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THE   STORY  OF  A 
VARIED   LIFE 

zAn  ^Autobiography 


Books  by  W.  S.  Rainsjord 

Sermons  Preached  in  St.  George's — 1887 

A  Preacher's  Story  of  His  Work — 1901 

Reasonableness  of  Faith — 1902 

Good  Friday  Meditation — 1902 

Land  of  the  Lion — 1909 

The  Reasonableness  of  the  Religion  of 
Jesus  {Baldwin  Lectures) — 1913 

The  Story  of  a  Varied  Life — 1922 


frrf.  ffcuU*  frtiL 


/fjs 


THE  STORY  OF  A 
VARIED  LIFE 

zAn  ^Autobiography 

BY 
W.  S.  RAINSFORD 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

FROM 

PHOTOGRA  PHS 


GARDEN  CITY  NEW  YORK 

DOUBLEDAY,  PAGE  &  COMPANY 
1922 


COPYRIGHT,  1922,  BY 

DOUBLEDAY,  PAGE  &  COMPANY 

ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED,  INCLUDING  THAT  OF  TRANSLATION 

INTO  FOREIGN  LANGUAGES,  INCLUDING  THE  SCANDINAVIAN 

PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES 

AT 

THE  COUNTRY  LIFE  PRESS,  GARDEN  CITY,  N.  Y. 

First  Edition 


TO 

EMILY   ALMA 

(my  wife) 

A  WOMAN  ABLE,  LOVING,  BRAVE 

HER  GIFTS  AND  HER  CHARACTER  HAVE  EVER 
BEEN  TO  HER  HUSBAND  AND  HER  SONS  AN 
INSPIRATION,  A  BENEDICTION,  AND  A  DEFENSE 


BX- 


LIBRARY 

JNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORJVL 

SANTA  BARBARA 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.     Introductory I 

II.     Earliest  Memories 9 

III.  Father  and  Mother 22 

IV.  Schooldays 36 

V.    An  Irish  Boy  in  London 44 

VI.    I  Go  Abroad 52 

VII.  The  East  End  of  London 63 

VIII.  The  Great  Lone  Land  and  the  Indian  Country 

IN  1869 73 

IX.     Cambridge           109 

X.    Norwich,  First  Cure  of  Souls 122 

XI.     Leaving  England          140 

XII.     An  Alien  Missioner 151 

XIII.  A  Dark  Night — and  a  Glorious  Morning       .     .  174 

XIV.     A  Unanimous  Call 196 

XV.     St.  George's,  1883 203 

XVI.  The  Beginnings  of  an  Institutional  Church      .  219 

XVII.  Avenue  A — Work  Among  the  Young     ....  232 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

XVIII.    Testing  of  Men  and  Measures  and  John  R.   .  256 

XIX.    My  Senior  Warden 277 

XX.    Our  Parish  House 293 

XXI.    New  York,  1890-1906 310 

XXII.    Anti-ism 332 

XXIII.  The  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  ....  346 

XXIV.  The  Roman  Catholic  Church  in  the  City  of 

New  York 360 

XXV.     Changes  of  Belief 370 

XXVI.    Preaching        384 

XXVII.    Theodore  Roosevelt 400 

XXVIII.    Four  Dinners 411 

XXIX.     Holidays  and  "Sunlight" 428 

XXX.    Memories  and  Good-Bye        , 460 

Index 477 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

W.  S.  Rainsford Frontispiece 

FACING  PAGE 

Hunting  Party  in  Rocky  Mountains,  1884       ....     278 

"  My  Boys  " 294 

"Life"        358 


THE   STORY  OF  A 
VARIED    LIFE 

zAn  ^Autobiography 


THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

CHAPTER  I 

Introductory 

I  am  not  writing  the  story  of  my  life  for  scholars.  I  can 
make  no  claims  to  scholarship  myself.  I  am  writing  for  my 
friends,  for  those  I  lived  among,  worked  for,  and  learned  to  love 
— and  who  loved  me. 

I  write  now  for  I  shall  soon  be  an  old  man.  I  do  not  feel  it; 
on  the  contrary,  I  can  truly  say  I  feel  more  in  sympathy  with 
all  people  round  me,  I  understand  them  better,  I  can  more 
readily  put  myself  in  their  places,  than  I  did  when  I,too,marched 
with  the  Column  in  the  strenuous  years  that  are  past. 

Still  the  young  fellows  now  call  me  Sir!  and  that  very  plainly 
indicates  they  think  I  am  growing  old.  So  I  shall  take  the  hint 
and  begin  to  write  my  biography  before  I  grow  any  older. 

I  write  it  because  I  have  a  story  to  tell.  I  have  been  a  very 
fortunate  man.  I  have  lived  in  great  times.  I  have  had  a 
very  interesting  life.  I  have  seen  more  of  the  world  than 
have  most  men.  I  have  done  things  I  am  sorry  for  and  things 
I  am  proud  of.  I  can  say,  I  think  with  truth,  that  I  have  tried 
to  serve  my  fellow  men;  and  the  older  I  grow,  and  the  more  I 
have  seen  of  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men,  the  more  pro- 
foundly I  believe  that  they  are  worth  serving.  That  is  another 
reason. 

Then  for  a  third  reason,  I  want  to  write.  I  have  a  profound 
dislike  for  biographies  as  they  are  poured  forth  on  us  to-day. 
Most  of  them  have  little  value  and  some  of  them  have  no  ex- 
cuse. They  are  poor,  sloppy  stuff,  and  mislead  those  who 
take  the  trouble  to  wade  through  them.  They  say  too  much 
and  too  little.  They  are  not  true  pictures  of  life.  The  men 
whose  life  stories  they  profess  to  tell  would  have  repudiated 
them.    Most  men  are  written  about  to-day,  as  till  lately,  ac- 


2  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

cording  to  a  ghastly  custom,  they  were  buried — in  their  dress 
suits,  the  most  uncomfortable,  the  most  unnatural  clothing 
man  ever  wore.  There  is,  of  course,  decency  in  everything. 
You  can't  bury  a  man  naked,  nor  can  you  strip  him  to  his  skin 
when  you  write  about  him.  None  of  us  can  tell  the  whole 
truth  about  ourselves,  and  none  of  us  knows  the  whole  truth 
about  any  living  soul  but  ourselves,  so  decency  demands  a 
measure  of  reticence. 

But,  so  much  admitted,  few  men  stand  forth  as  they  really 
were  in  their  biographies.  Alas,  it  has  already  fallen  to  my 
lot  to  read  the  biographies  of  quite  a  number  of  my  dear  friends. 
I  have  not  found  in  any  one  of  them  what  seemed  to  me  a  faith- 
ful picture  of  the  man  I  knew  and  loved. 

It  seems  a  point  of  honour  with  biographers  generally  to  rub 
down  a  life  as  an  upholsterer  rubs  down  with  a  lump  of  pumice 
stone  the  surface  of  a  bit  of  furniture,  till  it  will  take  a  satis- 
factory uniform  polish.  The  result,  as  was  to  be  expected,  is 
a  smooth  thing,  pleasant  to  look  at  and  feel,  but  the  storm-worn 
surface  of  the  man,  his  twisted  sinews  and  veins,  the  tendons 
and  the  thews  of  him  that  struggled  and  suffered  and  sinned 
and  conquered — what  is  left  of  them  ?  Were  they  ever  there  ? 
Sometimes  you  feel  you  have  to  go  back  to  the  Bible  or  to  the 
Renaissance,  to  Plutarch's  Lives,  or  to  that  incomparable  ras- 
cal, Benvenuto  Cellini,  for  real  biography. 

It's  not  quite  as  bad  as  that,  I  hope;  but  let  us  as  soon  as  we 
can  and  as  far  as  we  can  do  away  with  biographic  camouflage. 
It  may  be  necessary  in  war  between  enemies;  there  is  no  excuse 
for  it  in  peace  between  friends;  and  when  a  man  writes  his  life 
story  he  is  surely  among  friends,  and  of  his  friends  and  for  his 
friends  he  writes. 

The  men  you  loved  to  walk  with  and  work  with  did  not 
carry  their  hearts  on  their  sleeves,  but  that  they  had  hearts  you 
soon  found  out,  and  as  you  came  to  know  them  you  showed 
them  a  good  deal  of  your  own.  We  can  help  each  other  by 
trying,  heartily,  constantly  trying,  to  be  in  our  writings  what  we 
have  tried  to  be  in  our  lives,  honest  friends  and  kindly  com- 
panions to  those  who  honoured  us  with  their  company  on  life's 
highroad. 

Such  is  life,  and  such  should  be  the  quality  and  complexion  of 
a  biography,  and  doubly  so  of  an  autobiography.     You  quarrel 


INTRODUCTORY  3 

sometimes,  and  make  up,  or  part.  Sometimes  you  tell  stories. 
Sometimes  life  is  very  gray  and  sometimes  very  glad,  and  often 
it  is  neither,  but  just  steady  pushing;  but  always  it  is  real,  al- 
ways interesting,  always  worth  while.  Such  at  least  I  have 
found  it.  And  since  some  of  those  I  have  best  known  have 
asked  me  to  try  to  tell  my  story  I  shall  try  to  do  so,  and  as 
truthfully  as  I  can.  I  shall  speak  about  my  friends  and  ac- 
quaintances as  I  would  wish  they  spoke  about  me,  putting  them 
down  as  I  saw  them.  Men  and  women,  most  of  them  fine 
and  true,  stumbling  often,  falling  sometimes,  not  unreal  angels, 
winged  and  white  and  sexless,  unpleasant  to  live  with  and  in- 
capable of  raising  a  family.  I  have  some  interesting  stories  to 
tell  about  my  friends  and  fellow  soldiers,  but  I  shall  put  down 
nothing  so  far  as  I  am  judge  which  those  who  have  trusted  me 
would  be  pained  or  harmed  by  my  reporting,  for  from  my  own 
experience  I  have  learned  that  though  from  a  point  of  duty  it 
may  be  right  to  confess  when  you  have  done  wrong,  no  one  out- 
side of  a  novel  ever  does  it  without,  from  a  worldly  and  pro- 
fessional point  of  view,  making  a  grievous  mistake. 

No  man  is  happy  and  really  successful  alone.  We  are  made 
to  work  together,  to  supplement  one  another.  Truly  to  live,  to 
accomplish  anything  that  lasts,  you  must  do  it  with  the  aid 
of  others.  You  need  the  stimulus  of  their  support,  the  re- 
straint of  their  criticism.  A  few,  perhaps,  the  very  great  of  the 
earth,  have  stood  and  toiled  and  died  alone,  but  there  are  very 
few  of  the  very  great.  I  have  been  more  than  fortunate  in  my 
association  with  my  fellows.  In  my  relation  with  them  I  have 
suffered  from  some  serious  faults  of  my  own.  I  have  a  hasty 
and  often  an  unbridled  temper.  I  have  never  overcome  a 
tendency  to  act  too  precipitately.  My  father  truly  said  once 
in  my  hearing,  "he  jumps  first,  and  looks  afterwards."  And 
thus  I  have  offended  and  repulsed  many  I  had  no  intention  so 
to  serve. 

I  never  had  even  an  ordinarily  good  gift  of  memory.  I  am 
occasionally  haunted  by  a  face,  but  never  could  remember  a 
name.  This  is  a  serious  handicap  to  a  man  who  must  draw 
others  to  him  if  he  would  accomplish  anything;  yet  in  spite  of 
these  two  serious  drawbacks  I  have  been  very  happy  on  the 
whole  in  my  association  with  my  fellows.  I  have  tried  to 
understand  them.     I  have  tried  very  hard  to  put  myself  in  their 


4  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

places.  Men  and  women  have  always  been  exceedingly  inter- 
esting to  me.  I  have  found  it  easy  to  get  their  point  of  view, 
and  once  that  is  arrived  at,  oh!  how  charitable  one  has  to  be  to 
the  things,  even  the  wrong  things,  they  do.  Lack  of  imagina- 
tion, far  more  than  of  heart,  is  responsible,  I  am  sure,  for  our 
failures  better  to  understand  and  to  aid  each  other. 

I  can  honestly  say  I  have  tried  to  serve  those  that  I  have 
tried  to  understand.  One  tires  of  many  things  in  a  long  life. 
One  tires  of  all  sorts  of  pleasures.  But  of  helping  a  fellow 
marcher,  no  man  tires.  To  put  a  half-fledged  bird  back  in  the 
nest,  to  help  a  lame  dog  over  a  stile,  any  one  can  do  it,  and  no 
one  who  has  acquired  the  habit  grows  tired  of  the  job. 

I  have  implied  that  to  understand  people  came  easily  to  me. 
I  think  it  did.  On  the  other  hand,  to  be  quite  honest,  I  have 
been  aware  of  a  lack  of  permanence,  of  persistence,  in  my  in- 
terest, a  sort  of  come-easily-go-easily  quality  in  it,  of  which  I 
have  been  and  am  ashamed.  That  I  have  never  overcome  it, 
I  fear.  Perhaps  we  humans  have  no  facile  gift  without  its 
concomitant  weakness.  I  am  not  excusing  the  weakness;  I 
am  trying  to  state  the  fact,  to  indicate  things  that  with  me 
made  for  failure  as  well  as  others  that  made  for  success.  I  can 
truthfully  say  that  I  have  tried  to  be  true  to  my  fellows,  to  be 
worthy  of  their  confidence  and  affection.  Sometimes  I  have 
been  accused  of  failing  in  this,  but  if  so  it  was  not  of  intention. 
I  have  often  got  myself  into  very  serious  trouble  in  the  effort 
to  be  absolutely  true.  I  cannot  accuse  myself  of  having  ever 
willingly  and  knowingly  betrayed  a  confidence,  though  to  have 
done  so  on  more  than  one  occasion  would  have  greatly  smoothed 
my  way.  People  in  this  world  presume  sometimes  on  their 
belief  that,  no  matter  what  course  they  themselves  may  elect 
to  pursue,  those  they  have  been  associated  with  must  keep  the 
highroad  they  left  them  on.  That  is  an  unfair,  a  one-sided 
view  to  take,  and  some  take  it  pretty  successfully.  A  clergy- 
man cannot  take  it,  and  I  have  never  taken  it.  So  far,  then, 
as  I  can,  I  will  avoid  dwelling  in  these  reminiscences  on  the 
few  unfair,  unkind,  and  unjust  things  that  have  been  done  to 
me.  I  have  been  more  kindly  treated  than  I  deserved  by 
multitudes,  and  unkindly  and  unfairly  treated  by  very  few 
indeed,  and  if  I  had  been  wiser  in  my  treatment  of  these  very 
few,  no  doubt  it  would  have  been  better  for  me.     In  this 


INTRODUCTORY  5 

world  we  suffer  more  severely  for  our  mistakes  than  for  our 
sins. 

Well,  if  I  am  to  get  on  with  my  story,  I  must  shorten  my 
introduction.  If  I  do  not,  no  one  will  read  it  through,  and  this 
I  very  specially  desire  that  all  my  friends  should  do.  I  wonder 
as  I  look  back  on  my  life  from  boyhood's  days  to  1906,  when  I 
resigned  the  rectorship  of  St.  George's,  New  York,  at  the 
sustained  and  faithful  support  I  received  from  all  sorts  of  people. 
Especially  do  I  wonder  at  my  support  in  New  York  City.  I 
was  very  poorly  fitted  to  be  the  rector  of  a  great  parish  in  a 
great  city.  I  was  inexperienced,  very  imperfectly  educated,  and 
had  little  knowledge  of  the  world.  Many  of  those  I  was  thrown 
with  disagreed  radically  with  me,  and  were,  owing  to  training  and 
environment,  quite  opposed  to  the  theories  I  advocated  and  the 
reforms  I  strove  to  effect.  Theologically  and  sociologically 
they  were  antagonistic,  yet  the  support  they  gave  me  was 
enthusiastic.  Looking  back  on  it  all,  I  am  amazed.  I  suppose  I 
had  some  quality  of  leadership  that  they .  recognized,  though, 
frankly,  I  was  not  myself  conscious  of  possessing  it.  I  did 
see  things  I  wanted  to  do.  I  did  believe  they  should  be  done, 
and  I  bent  such  powers  as  I  had  to  the  doing  of  them.  Anyway, 
it  is  but  the  truth  to  say  I  ever  and  always  had  from  my  people 
the  most  loyal  and  generous  support. 

To  call  our  American  people  materialistic  is  folly.  They 
are  in  everything,  in  business,  in  art,  in  social  effort,  and  re- 
ligion, too,  the  most  idealistic  people  of  all  time.  Too  idealistic, 
if  anything  (see  our  seventy-six  different  religious  sects).  They 
forgive  their  leaders'  blunders.  They  ignore  and  forget  their 
failures.  They  encourage  them  to  go  on  and  try  again.  I 
know  England  and  Ireland,  I  know  Canada,  and  much  as  I 
like  the  British  and  Canadian  people,  I  say  that  our  people 
are  the  most  stimulative,  the  most  long-suffering,  the  most 
encouraging  people  to  work  with,  if  only  you  can  convince  them 
you  are  trying  to  do  your  poor  best.  They  prove  often  to- 
day the  truth  of  Jesus'  splendid  forecast,  "Give  to  man  and  it 
shall  be  given  to  you,  good  measure,  pressed  down,  shaken  to- 
gether, and  running  over  shall  men  give  into  your  bosom."  So 
please,  dear  reader,  of  this  my  story,  when  I  speak  of  things 
done,  aims  achieved  or  partly  achieved,  remember  I  do  not 
imply  that  I  accomplished  them.    It  is  impossible  always  to 


6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

pause  and  explain  that  the  credit  given  was  not  due  to  me 
alone,  to  my  foresight  or  my  persistence,  but  here  once  for  all 
let  me  state  it. 

During  the  four  years  I  was  assistant  rector  of  St.  James 
Cathedral  at  Toronto,  during  the  twenty-four  years  I  was 
Rector  of  St.  George's,  my  young  clergy,  my  large  and  very 
heterogeneous  band  of  religious  volunteer  workers,  my  some- 
times doubting  but  always  loyal  vestry,  the  old  and  the  young, 
the  rich  and  the  poor,  the  intelligent  and  the  ignorant,  we  all 
strove,  we  all  worked  together,  and  it  was  unity  of  purpose  that 
gave  us  the  success,  and  it  was  great,  that  we  won.  If  I  had 
been  a  wiser  and  a  better  man  much  more  might  have  been 
accomplished,  for  no  man  ever  had  more  loyal  or  more  loving 
supporters. 

I  venture  then  on  an  autobiography,  because  I  have  a  story 
worth  the  telling.  I  have  seen  things  worth  seeing.  I  have 
known  men  and  women  worth  knowing,  and  I  have  had  some 
small  part  in  accomplishing  things  worth  doing.  I  have 
travelled  rather  far,  sometimes  in  lands  not  yet  well  known; 
sometimes  among  tribes  not  known  at  all,  when  first  I  met 
with  them.  I  have  spoken  what  I  believed  was  the  truth,  and 
in  speaking  of  it  I  have  had  a  real  joy.  I  have  come  into  close 
and  sometimes  intimate  contact  with  the  poor  man  and  the 
rich,  with  the  savage  and  the  saint,  with  labour  unionist  and 
multimillionaire,  and  I  can  truly  say  I  have  loved  men  of  one 
type  and  of  all  types  and  have  found  them  well  worth  loving. 
I  had  some  gift  of  speaking;  I  found  I  could  move  men  when  I 
spoke.  I  doubt  if  I  have  any  special  gift  of  writing.  Still  I 
shall  hope  that  those  who  take  the  trouble  to  read  my  story  from 
end  to  end  may  find  in  it  some  things  to  interest,  some  things 
to  amuse,  and  let  me  hope,  too,  that  I  shall  not  altogether  fail  at 
the  close  of  my  life  in  being  of  some  service  to  those  who, 
like  myself,  have  been  obliged  to  give  up  old,  well-loved 
creeds  and  have  only  very  partially  succeeded  in  finding  new 
ones.  I  have  written  much  about  my  religious  life.  It  meant 
all  in  all  to  me.  I  have  dwelt  on  its  changes.  They  were 
costly  and  painful,  but  as  I  look  back  I  see  that  they  were  in- 
evitable. I  am  very  sure  we  are  too  reticent  in  speaking  of  our 
religious  experiences.  I  shall  therefore  try  to  avoid  such  ret- 
icences.   The  clergy  fail  in  leadership  because  they  are  too 


INTRODUCTORY  7 

often  afraid  openly  to  own  that  their  own  religious  views  have 
radically  changed.  Clergy  and  laity,  we  were  all  brought  up 
that  way.  Religious  matters  are  packed  away,  are  not  aired. 
The  discussion  of  them  is  often  left  to  the  platitudinarians  who 
have  neither  studied,  nor  thought,  nor  lived.  We  speak  of 
trivial  things,  but  those  nearest  our  hearts  we  hide.  If  we 
spoke  more  frankly  of  what  we  really  feel  and  believe  we  would 
help  others  and  gain  help  ourselves.  The  influences  that  have 
forced  changes  on  you  have  been  at  work  on  thoughtful  men 
round  you.  If  you  have  striven  hard  to  retain  the  creed  of 
your  mother,  simple,  beautiful,  all  satisfying  as  it  was  to  her, 
and  have  striven  in  vain;  if  some  dear  old  belief  that  had  lighted 
many  a  dark  hour  and  helped  you  on  many  a  rough  and  lonely 
mile  has  had  to  go,  and  a  new  sense  of  loneliness  comes  over 
you,  oh!  my  friend,  my  fellow  soldier,  speak  out,  tell  your 
pain,  tell  your  story,  and  you  will  find  as  I  have  found  that 
you  are  not  alone;  others  have  had  the  same  doubts,  have  made 
the  same  gradual  surrenders,  and  are  now  groping  like  yourself 
toward  the  same  conclusions;  for  surely  we  all  are  as  the  writer  to 
the  Hebrews  said  long  ago,  "parting  with  the  things  that  can  be  .  i 
shaken,  that  the  things  which  cannot  be  shaken  may  remain." 

Some  who  read  this  story  of  mine  will  criticize  harshly  my 
changes  of  faith,  and  perhaps  still  more  harshly  my  so  plainly 
recording  them. 

Coleridge  says  that  the  man  who  puts  Christianity  before 
truth  will  later  put  what  he  wants  to  believe  before  Christianity. 

Jesus,  face  to  face  with  martyrdom,  summed  up  his  mission 
in  words  clear  beyond  argument  (here  the  record  rings  true; 
none  dared  invent  such  words  for  him):  "To  this  end  was  I 
born,  for  this  cause  came  I  into  the  world,  that  I  should  bear 
witness  unto  the  truth.  Every  one  that  is  of  the  truth  heareth 
my  voice." 

To  me  it  seems  dishonest  for  one  whose  life  was  spent  in 
trying  to  teach  the  meaning  of  that  great  man's  life  to  practise 
any  evasion  when  he  tells  the  story  of  his  own  changes  of  creed. 
Jesus  changed  his  creed.  His  message  to  men  at  the  close  of 
those  three  brief  years  differed  from  his  message  at  their  be- 
ginning. So  I  must  write,  so  far  as  I  am  able,  truly;  and  in  my 
biography  speak,  as  I  tried  to  speak  when  I  was  younger,  things 
that  are  true,  or  rather  the  truest  I  see. 


8  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Mine,  then,  is  the  story  of  an  ordinary  sort  of  boy,  youth,  and 
man,  who  sometimes  made  a  success  of  things,  and  sometimes 
made  a  mess  of  things,  but  who,  in  success  or  failure,  found  one 
golden  thread  always  lying  on  the  earthen  floor  of  even  the 
darkest  windings  in  life's  maze.  If  you  have  not  already  found 
it,  I  beg  you  look  for  it  now.  It  is  easy  to  find.  Hold  fast  to 
it,  and  you  will  never  quite  lose  either  your  way  or  your  courage. 
I  am  persuaded  it  is  the  best  guide  we  have  to  real  influence, 
happiness,  and  true  religion.  This  is  my  golden  clue:  "Try  to 
serve  your  fellows  with  all  your  heart  and  you  will  not  be  far 
from  your  God!" 


CHAPTER  II 

Earliest  Memories 

We  lose  the  proper  sense  of  the  richness  of  life — if  we  do  not  look  back 
on  the  scenes  of  our  youth  with  imaginative  warmth. — G.  Meredith. 

Later  pages  are  sometimes  dim  in  a  life's  story,  but  not  the 
opening  pages — these  in  mine  I  remember  well.  Certain  things 
fasten  themselves  in  the  memory,  others  are  uprooted  and  for- 
gotten. Is  there  any  rule  governing  generally  their  retention 
or  their  loss  ? 

There  are  of  course  vital  moments,  epoch-making  experiences, 
which  no  sane  mind  can  forget — as  when  you  first  looked  on 
that  strange  cold  thing,  the  dead  face  of  a  friend.  Or  when  you 
first  stared  death  full  in  the  face  for  yourself.  Or  when  from 
head  to  foot  your  body  thrilled  at  the  first  kiss  of  a  woman  who 
loved  you.  Or  when  in  awful  expectancy  you  waited  and  waited 
outside  the  door  beyond  which  love  and  agony  were  giving  to 
the  world  your  firstborn.  To  forget  such  hours  would  be  to 
cease  to  be. 

But  for  the  rest,  at  least  in  my  own  case,  the  most  vital 
memories  I  have  are  associated  with  some  compelling  per- 
ception of  beauty.  It  is  Beauty  that  seems  to  have  the  power  of 
stamping  an  impression  on  our  mind  tablets  from  which  pitiless 
time  so  easily  blots  out  a  multitude  of  things  we  would  fain 
remember. 

Let  me  go  back  more  than  fifty  years  to  a  day  in  the  late  fall 
of  1869,  when,  very  weary  and  very  hungry,  after  a  long  life- 
and-death  struggle  through  one  of  the  densest  and  darkest 
forests  in  the  world,  unmapped  and  untracked  in  those  days,  I, 
staggering  to  the  crest  of  a  great  mountain  range,  looked  down 
and  out  on  a  jagged  outline,  vast,  rocky,  ribbed  with  frozen 
waterfalls,  lifting  its  ramp  to  the  clear  winter  sky.  Somewhere 
it  was  in  the  wilderness  of  the  Canadian  Alpine  country,  north 


io  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

of  the  United  States  boundary  line.  I  cannot  place  it  exactly 
now — there  were  then  no  detailed  maps  when  we  two,  my  future 
brother-in-law  and  I,  helped  by  two  wavering  and  very  home- 
sick Hudson  Bay  Indian  guides,  struggled  through  its  awful 
solitudes.  Winter  was  almost  on  us.  Snow  very  deep.  The 
wild  sheep  and  goats  were  our  only  trail  makers.  Windfalls  of 
pines,  sometimes  thirty  feet  in  height,  had  barred  our  way  for- 
ward and  shut  us  in.  Our  provisions  were  almost  gone;  our 
horses  were  skeletons.  Each  night  by  the  fire,  our  Indians  told 
tales  of  starvation  and  death,  or  chanted  the  weird  howling 
song,  their  homesick  song  they  called  it,  as  they  begged  us  to 
turn  back  to  the  land  we  had  left,  of  sunshine  and  of  buffalo. 

Weeks  we  had  passed  in  struggle  with  the  encompassing 
forest.  Not  a  standing  forest  only  of  living  stems,  but  a  dead 
forest  cumbering  the  ground,  fallen  trees  matted  together  by 
ages  of  frost  and  storm.  The  living,  spreading  veils  over  the 
dead;  gray,  pendent  veils  of  moss  thirty  feet  high,  that  shut  out 
air  and  sunlight.  But  we — that  unforgettable  evening — we  had 
burst  through  at  last.  We  had  crossed  the  Rocky  Mountains, 
had  done  what  they  said  could  not  be  done,  crossed  them  by  a 
trail  of  our  very  own.  And  now,  standing  on  the  topmost 
ridge  of  the  Great  Divide,  our  sun  shone  in  a  kindlier  sky,  and 
showed  us  a  great  sweep  of  more  open  country,  falling,  falling 
away  to  the  Pacific  Sea. 

The  iron  gates  of  an  iron  land  closed  behind  us  that  evening. 
The  dreadful  darkness,  the  voiceless  gloom  of  the  solitudes  we 
had  passed  through,  was  beneath  our  feet  and  behind  us.  On 
the  foothills  to  westward  the  sinking  sun  was  shining,  and 
the  snows  were  crimson  in  its  light.  The  forest  itself  was 
wrapped  in  purple,  and  over  all  that  splendid,  lonely  mountain- 
land  the  penetrating  peace  of  a  windless  evening  fell. 

I  stood  by  my  weary  horse's  head  and  drank  it  all  in,  and  I 
see  that  glorious  panorama  now.  Surely  it  was  life  itself  I  was 
gazing  on,  its  fierce  struggle  almost  hopeless  at  times;  no  force 
in  our  puny  selves  fitted  to  grapple  with  its  pitiless,  unyielding 
might.  But  the  thing  had  to  be  done,  the  path  had  to  be  cut, 
the  range  had  to  be  crossed — and  when  it  is  all  over,  then  at  last 
some  miraculous,  transmuting  spell  of  beauty  falls  on  it  all 
and  we  are  at  peace;  we  are  thankful  for  every  hour  of  the 
struggle,  and  we  know  life  is  good. 


EARLIEST  MEMORIES  n 

But  why  do  we  know  life  is  good?  Because  it  is  the  beauty 
of  it,  not  the  pain  of  it,  that  ever  lives  within  us.  The  beauty 
we  remember,  the  pain  we  forget.  Marlowe  emphasizes  this 
when,  in  a  mighty  line,  he  sums  up  the  story  of  all  the  tragedies 
and  losses  of  the  old  world's  first  great  venture  into  a  newer 
time: 

Was  this  the  face  that  launched  a  thousand  ships 
And  burnt  the  topless  towers  of  Ilium? 

A  nation  in  arms  to  avenge  Beauty,  the  one  thing  worth  living 
and  dying  for. 

If  we  had  ears  to  hear  or  eyes  to  see,  we  would  know  that  the 
story  of  Troy,  the  song  of  Homer,  are  reacted  and  resung  even 
on  the  slovenly  streets  of  our  great  cities  to-day.  When  the 
Fourth  Avenue  cars  were  still  towed  by  horses  I  had  occasion 
constantly  to  use  them.  I  came  to  know  some  of  the  drivers, 
and,  I  am  afraid,  sometimes  broke  the  Company's  rule  of  not 
talking  to  the  man  that  drove.  One  man,  an  Irishman,  I  came 
to  know  better  than  the  rest.  Wages  were  low  then,  and 
reports  of  a  change  were  in  the  air,  and  I  asked  him  if,  like 
many  others,  he  would  leave  the  line.  "No,  sorr,"  said  he, 
"I  would  not  miss  passing  that  Tower"  (we  were  passing 
Stanford  White's  beautiful  campanile  on  Madison  Square 
Garden)  "for  fifty  cents  a  day."  (That  was  the  extra  wage 
the  street-car  drivers  were  demanding.) 

Yes,  a  thing  of  beauty  touching  our  struggling  lives  may 
put  heart  and  hope  into  the  best,  yes,  and  into  the  worst  of  us. 
Into  the  poor,  unknown  Irishman  who  preferred  the  thing  of 
beauty  he  had  grown  to  love,  to  a  much-needed  raise  of  wages, 
quite  as  truly  as  into  the  Captain  of  Industry  who  could  delight 
himself  in  his  private  gallery.  When  we  learn  to  love  her, 
Beauty  helps  us  all  to  believe,  not  only  in  the  best  things  we 
know,  but  in  the  best  things  we  dream.  Though  he  could  not 
talk  about  it  or  well  explain  what  he  felt,  or  why  he  felt  it,  so 
much  had  poor  Stanford  White's  lovely  tower  done  for  my 
Irish  street-car  driver. 

I  have  a  distinct  memory  of  a  little  cottage,  covered  with 
sweet  white  jasmine,  its  bay  window  opening  on  the  ground. 
Of  a  small  lawn,  sloping  down  to  a  tiny  brook  that  trickled 
along  with  pools  in  it.     In  these  I  saw  little  black  things  darting 


12  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

about;  Father  said  they  were  "pinkeens."  He  caught  one  for 
me  and,  as  it  lay  in  his  hand,  I  wondered  exceedingly  how  the 
black  thing  I  saw  in  the  water  as  I  looked  down  on  it  from  his 
shoulder  could  change  into  the  silvery  flat  thing  that  lay 
broadside  in  his  hand. 

That  was  my  first  lesson  in  natural  history,  and  very  vivid  it 
is  to  me  still.  I  could  not  have  been  two  years  old  then,  and  I 
am  told  that  reminiscences  of  so  early  an  age  are  unusual.  If 
so,  I  must  have  somehow  used  up,  when  I  was  very  little,  too 
much  of  what  gifts  of  memory  were  allotted  me,  for  now,  of 
things  that  happened  only  yesterday,  my  mind  is  a  poor  regis- 
trar. 

That  was  at  Coolock,  a  modest  Dublin  suburb,  where  I  was 
born,  October  30, 1850. 

My  boyhood  story  begins  in  the  old  town  of  Dundalk,  and  it 
is  a  beautiful  part  of  it  that  I  most  distinctly  remember.  I  see 
still,  as  clearly  as  I  saw  with  a  little  boy's  eyes  sixty-five  years 
ago,  the  graceful  sweep  of  the  purple  hill  line  as  the  Mourn 
Mountains  gradually  sank  to  the  sea.  It  was  the  view  from  the 
old  red  brick  Vicarage  window  at  Dundalk,  where  we  all  lived 
together  till  I  was  fifteen  years  of  age.  Very  beautiful  it  was, 
but  the  foreground  was  commonplace  enough.  A  gray-green 
salt  meadow,  and  beyond  it,  for  more  than  a  mile,  mud  flats 
through  which  a  shallow  river  ran,  widening  and  deepening 
as  it  formed  the  little  half-deserted  port,  where  at  low  tide,  at 
every  possible  angle,  the  colliers  and  fishing  smacks  lay  tilted, 
waiting  for  the  incoming  tide  to  straighten  them  up.  There 
was  no  beauty  there,  just  a  slovenly  port  on  a  muddy  coast; 
but  that  lovely  heather-covered  line  of  mountain,  the  slopes 
patched  with  ripe  fields  of  yellow  barley,  lifted  all  the  flat 
marshes  on  both  sides  of  the  river  into  beauty  that  was  its  own. 

I  must  say  a  word  about  these  mud  flats,  by  the  way,  before 
I  leave  them.  While  I  was  very  little,  those  mysterious  moun- 
tains were  a  far-off  wonderland  to  me.  I  came  to  roam  them 
and  claim  them  later,  but  the  mud  flats  were  near,  and  had  a 
fascinating  interest  of  their  own.  Little  crabs  hid  in  the  edges 
of  the  sea  grass,  and  strange  small  fishes  squirmed  into  the 
mud  at  the  bottom  of  the  shallow  pools  of  brackish  water  left 
there  when  the  tide  ran  down.  They  were  an  awfully  dirty 
playground,  and  far  out  from  our  meadow's  edge  I  could  not 


EARLIEST  MEMORIES  13 

go,  for  the  mud  was  too  deep;  but  how  interesting  they  were, 
and  what  wonderful  things  they  hid ! 

As  I  grew  older  I  wanted  to  know  the  names  of  the  sea  birds, 
too,  that  came  to  feed  on  them:  the  different  wild  ducks  that 
fed  on  the  flats  as  soon  as  the  tide  went  down;  the  long-necked 
diving  cormorants  that  used  to  perch  on  the  tops  of  the  wooden 
piles  that  marked  the  narrow,  twisting  channel's  course;  the 
plovers  and  curlews  with  long  curved  bills,  and  the  flocks  of 
little,  flashing  sand-pipers  that  kept  running  on  the  very  edge 
of  the  salt  water  as  it  rose  and  fell.  Father  knew  the  names 
of  them  all,  and  was  my  willing  instructor. 

But  I  must  get  away  from  the  flats  of  the  bay  and  the  dreamy 
mountains,  and  tell  of  my  boyhood's  home,  and  Father  and 
Mother  who  made  it. 

ANCESTRY 

On  my  father's  side  we  claim  an  ancient  lineage,  and  we  were 
taught  to  be  proud  of  it.  I  cannot  vouch  for  its  complete  ac- 
curacy, but  must  give  an  outline  of  it  as  it  was  given  to  me. 
Spelling  was  held  to  be  of  little  importance  in  those  bygone 
times,  and  I  am  told  that  in  my  family  history  there  have  been 
almost  seventy  variants  in  spelling  the  name.  The  common 
custom,  too,  of  adding  to  their  own  names  those  of  the  chief 
manors  they  acquired  either  by  marriage  or  by  less  legitimate 
means,  adds  to  the  confusion.  This  makes  the  accurate  work- 
ing out  of  a  genealogy  no  easy  matter.  My  great-grandfather 
did,  however,  for  many  years  patiently  attempt  the  task,  and 
produced  a  family  tree  of  imposing  height  and  girth.  Alas!  a 
fire  consumed  it,  and  a  good  many  other  things  of  interest  to  us. 

Reduced  to  a  few  lines  it  comes  to  this:  when  Rollo  the  Norse- 
man swept  over  Normandy  in  the  Tenth  Century,  he  had  among 
his  band  one  Guy  Rainsford.  This  Guy  Rainsford  must  have 
amounted  to  something  as  a  fighting  man,  for  he  managed  to 
secure  for  himself  and  his  descendants  a  very  large  share  of  the 
conquered  province.  One  of  these  Rainsfords  was  Archbishop 
of  Rouen  two  centuries  later.  Other  of  Guy's  descendants 
crossed  to  England  in  1066  with  the  Conqueror,  and  very  soon 
seem  to  have  firmly  settled  themselves  in  three  different  parts  of 
England — in  Essex,  in  Cornwall,  and  in  Lancashire.  From  the 
Lancashire  men  we  claim  descent. 


i4  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Some  of  them  "took  the  Cross"  in  the  Thirteenth  Century, 
and  followed  Prince  Edward,  afterward  Edward  I,  to  the 
Holy  Land,  changing  their  older  coat  of  arms  for  the  Cross  and 
their  family  motto  for  the  Crusaders'  motto,  "In  Hoc  Signo 
Vinces."  The  family  flourished  in  the  times  of  Edward  III — 
one  of  them  then  held  Calais  for  the  King — and  seems  to  have 
been  pretty  badly  cut  up,  as  were  most  ancient  English  families, 
in  the  Wars  of  the  Roses. 

During  or  after  those  troublous  times,  some  of  the  Lancashire 
Rainsfords  came  to  Ireland.  They  lived  within  the  Pale  in 
Elizabeth's  times,  and  were  loyal  servants  of  the  English  Crown. 
Under  Elizabeth  and  James  and  Charles,  they  prospered,  and 
acquired  considerable  landed  property.  When  the  Stewarts' 
fortunes  fell,  theirs  fell  with  them.  Some  fought  on  William  the 
Third's  side.  In  those  days  my  direct  ancestor  was  a  stout 
Orangeman,  and  his  name  you  can  see  proudly  cut  on  the  pedes- 
tal of  the  equestrian  statue  erected  to  the  Conqueror  of  the 
Boyne.  It  stands  near  Carlisle  Bridge,  in  Dublin,  and  looks 
down  on  the  Liffy.  The  wandering  instincts  of  the  family,  by 
the  way,  had  not  died  down,  for  in  the  Seventeenth  Century 
one  Robert  Rainsford,  with  others,  secured  a  grant  from  War- 
wick House,  London,  December  2,  1631,  to  build  a  town  in 
New  England.  This  was  Boston.  An  island  in  that  harbour  is 
called  after  him,  and  many  years  ago  I  saw,  on  the  corner  of  one 
of  the  old  crooked  streets  of  the  lower  town,  his  name. 

One  of  the  strange  things  about  the  Irish  race  has  been  its 
power  of  absorbing  those  immigrant  peoples  who  cast  in  their 
lot  with  the  Celt.  The  descendants  of  Strongbow's  Knights 
and  Cromwell's  Irreconcilable  Ironsides  have  both  given  to 
Ireland  some  of  her  most  resolute  champions  against  English 
misrule.  My  forebears,  after  the  days  of  William  III,  seem 
soon  to  have  fallen  into  the  haphazard  ways  of  the  country. 
The  family  gradually  fell  from  its  high  estate.  It  did  not,  in 
England  or  Ireland  or  in  America,  produce  men  of  marked 
ability.  The  New  England  branch  was  deported  to  New  Bruns- 
wick when  Boston  surrendered  to  Washington's  army;  and 
hardship  and  salt  codfish  together  proved  so  unfavourable  that, 
as  one  of  them  told  me  some  years  ago,  they  had  not  been  able 
to  produce  a  first-class  lawyer,  doctor,  or  parson  since  1780. 

In  Ireland  we  fooled  away  our  property,  and  so  it  was  that 


EARLIEST  MEMORIES  15 

what  of  it  came  to  my  father  was  a  small  estate  indeed.  And 
with  his  life  the  entail  ended  of  Rainsford  Lodge,  County  Wick- 
low,  the  modest  house  in  which  he  was  born. 

My  mother  was  the  daughter  of  Stephen  Dickson,  the  Rector 
of  Dungarvan,  in  the  south  of  Ireland.  Her  great-grand- 
father was  a  friend  and  schoolmate  of  Charles  James  Fox,  at 
Eton.  From  their  school  days  a  life-long  affection  united  the 
two  men,  and  the  Great  Commoner  made  his  friend  Bishop  of 
Down.  I  think  his  was  the  only  Episcopal  appointment  Fox 
made.  Mother  treasured  some  relics  of  that  great-grandfather. 
One  of  them  I  have  still,  the  only  piece  remaining  of  a  silver 
tea-and-coffee  service  which  Fox  gave  the  Bishop. 

Mother's  people  were  a  fighting  stock,  too.  Her  great-uncle 
was  one  of  Wellington's  Brigadiers,  and  later  was  made  Gover- 
nor of  Halifax,  Sir  Jeremiah  Dickson. 

DUNDALK 

My  father  was  appointed  to  the  vicarage  of  Dundalk  by  the 
Earl  of  Roden,  the  patron  of  the  living,  in  1852.  The  Earl 
was  a  kind  and  constant  friend  to  our  family. 

Dundalk  was  then,  and  is  still,  a  straggling,  untidy  town, 
claiming  some  ten  thousand  inhabitants,  the  great  majority  of 
course  being  Roman  Catholics.  Its  two  long,  badly  paved 
streets  crossed  at  the  market  place.  Saturday,  market  day,  the 
country  folk  for  many  miles  round  came  to  town  to  sell  such 
things  as  they  had  to  sell,  from  pigs,  cows,  and  horses,  to  apples, 
potatoes,  and  fish.  You  heard  Gaelic  talked  among  the 
market  stalls,  and  the  homespun,  gray-frieze,  swallow-tailed 
coat,  battered  stove-pipe  hat,  stout  worsted  stockings,  and 
tight  corduroy  breeches  still  marked  the  prosperous  farmer. 

Dundalk  is  an  ancient  town,  well  placed.  It  stands  at  the 
head  of  a  considerable  bay  into  which  a  short  river  rising  in 
the  near-by  mountains  runs.  The  ruins  of  an  old  castle  stood 
some  way  back  from  the  water — it  had  no  doubt  once  com- 
manded the  port.  Indeed,  there  are  ruins  of  many  old  castles 
in  that  part  of  the  country;  Carlingford  Lough,  the  next  inlet 
to  Dundalk  Bay,  to  the  northeast,  was  studded  with  them. 
Legend  said  Cromwell's  cannon  had  pounded  them  into  sub- 
mission, but  then,  if  all  the  stories  of  the  great  Protector's 


16  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

cannon  work  in  Ireland  were  true,  he  could  never  have  left 
that  country  during  his  short  and  stormy  career.  But  plenty 
of  fighting,  real  enough,  there  had  been  near  Dundalk.  The 
great  Robert  Bruce's  brother,  Edward,  was  killed  in  an  eventful 
battle  near  by;  and  Danish  pirates,  Irish  kings,  and  English 
soldiers,  from  Strongbow's  time  till  the  last  tragic,  useless  rising 
in  1798,  had  done  what  they  could  to  foster  in  the  neighbour- 
hood the  Irishman's  love  of  fighting. 

How  hard  I  tried  to  get  someone  to  tell  me  the  story  of  it  all, 
but  I  never  succeeded.  Between  the  Irish  peasant  and  the  class 
that  owned  the  land  and  administered  the  law  in  those  days 
there  was  "a  great  gulf  fixed."  Those  who  could  tell  the  local 
stories  were  silent  or  had  crossed  the  sea. 

My  first  recollections  of  Dundalk  were  naturally  of  the  old 
red-brick  vicarage,  with  its  row  of  elm  trees  facing  the  moun- 
tains and  the  sea;  and  next,  the  old  church  and  two  unusual 
things  about  it:  its  crooked  spire,  always  threatening  to  tumble 
sideways  off  its  base  on  the  ivy-draped  stone  tower,  and  the 
Sunday  morning  collection,  gathered  from  everyone  in  the 
congregation,  in  great  long  copper  spoons.  I  never  before  or 
since  saw  such  a  steeple,  nor  have  I  been  able  to  duplicate  any- 
where those  copper  spoons. 

How  the  very  old  tower  came  to  have  that  wooden,  copper- 
sheathed  monstrosity  built  on  top  of  it  no  one  knew,  but  there  it 
stood,  spite  of  its  tipsy  tilt  to  one  side,  defying  wind  and 
weather;  and  the  weather  had  given  to  the  copper  sheathing  a 
rich  colouring  that  attracted  me.  Why,  too,  we  had  to  put  our 
pennies  in  those  long-handled  spoons  where  they  rattled  loudly 
no  one  knew:  such  was  the  custom  of  the  church.  The  church- 
wardens, having  made  their  rounds,  marched  solemnly  with 
their  several  spoons,  not  to  my  father  and  the  Holy  Table, 
but  to  their  own  seats;  only  when  church  was  dismissed  did 
they  bring  them  to  the  chancel  and  empty  them  with  clangour 
on  the  table. 

The  first  Sunday  in  the  month  a  great  silver  salver  stood 
up  on  the  Communion  table  against  the  wall,  and  into  it  the 
spoonfuls  were  emptied,  with  a  still  louder  clangour.  My 
interest  culminated  then,  for  I  was  allowed  to  help  Father  and 
the  churchwardens  in  counting  the  collection;  in  it  appeared 
many  strange  coins,  mostly  copper,  of  course,  of  many  coun- 


EARLIEST  MEMORIES  17 

tries  and  of  many  dates.  Coins  as  to  the  value  of  which  a 
more  than  reasonable  doubt  existed  were  apt  to  find  their 
way  into  those  spoons;  more  especially  since  their  tops,  half 
covered  over,  served  admirably  to  hide  from  the  most  watchful 
churchwarden's  eye  the  exact  nature  of  the  offering.  The 
money  was  stacked  in  little  piles  of  shillings  on  the  Communion 
table.  When  there  was  silver  (as  on  Communion  Sundays  and 
Sundays  when  there  would  be  Missionary  collections)  in  pounds, 
almost  always  the  interesting  question  of  valuation  had  to  be 
solved.  Were  these  half-pennies  or  pennies  or  farthings? 
Were  these  silver  bits  to  be  counted  as  threepenny  or  four- 
penny,  as  sixpences  or  as  shillings?  It  was  all  extremely  in- 
teresting. I  remember  at  one  time  Father  had  quite  a  col- 
lection of  strange  coins,  for  which  of  course  he  had  paid,  week 
by  week,  what  he  believed  was  an  honest  equivalent  in  coin 
of  the  realm.     What  became  of  it  I  can't  remember. 

The  church  was  cruciform  in  plan;  the  pews,  as  was  then 
usual  in  Ireland,  were  of  different  sizes,  graded  to  express  the 
importance  of  the  families  that  had  occupied  them  for  genera- 
tions. Some  were  large  and  square,  even  having  a  table,  and 
sometimes  a  stove,  in  the  middle.  If  you  were  not  interested 
in  the  sermon  you  might  be  in  your  neighbours,  for  you  looked 
full  into  their  faces  as  often  as  at  their  backs.  The  Com- 
munion table,  with  its  blue  cloth  (any  other  colour  smelled  of 
popery)  stood  under  the  ancient  and  ugly  stained-glass  window 
of  the  chancel.  Facing  the  chancel,  at  the  far  end  of  the 
church,  was  the  organ  loft,  and  there  sat  such  poor  choir  as 
was  to  be  had.  In  the  south  aisle  was  another  loft,  divided 
into  just  two  great  pews,  one  for  the  Earl,  the  other  for  the 
local  distiller. 

I  can  see  the  old  church  on  Sunday  morning,  as  I  write  to- 
day, full  to  the  doors,  and  not  dimly  some  of  the  faces  rise  before 
me.  Many  a  congregation  I  have  faced  since  then,  but  few 
can  I  remember  as  well  as  this,  and  I  think  I  am  right  in  saying 
that  those  who  formed  it  Sunday  after  Sunday  were  no  ordi- 
nary crowd.  There  was  the  distiller,  his  two  sons,  and  three 
daughters.  To  them  we  looked  for  the  fashions.  Dundalk 
whiskey  had  a  more  than  local  reputation  in  those  days,  and 

Mr.  H had  made  some  money  and  saved  it.     The  family 

had  social  ambitions,  and  since,  somehow,  this  came  to  be 


1 8  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

understood,  it  gave  rise  to  amusement;  for  a  family  tree 
counted  for  a  good  deal  in  Ireland,  and  the  H 's  were  sup- 
posed to  have  none.     The  curious  thing  was  that  one  of  Mr. 

H 's  children,  the  youngest  son,  did  carve  out  for  himself 

a  very  unusually  brilliant  social  career.  He  entered  the  army 
and  became,  to  the  amazement  of  the  whole  countryside, 
equerry  to  the  Prince  of  Wales  (afterward  Edward  VII). 
He  began  by  hard  work,  too,  for  he  won  by  sheer  ability  a 
commission  in  the  Royal  Engineers,  passing  out  of  Woolwich 
near  the  head  of  his  class;  and  he  certainly  made  the  most  of  his 
start. 

Where  centre  aisle  and  side  aisles  met  sat  John  Barton  and 
his  family,  in  a  great  square  pew.  John  Barton  was  a  very 
unusually  gifted  man;  and,  though  he  did  not  seem  to  know  it, 
and  his  neighbours  certainly  did  not,  a  man  far  ahead  of  his 
time.  His  was  the  brain  that  planned  the  Menai  Straits 
Bridge,  a  marvel  of  engineering  in  those  days.  And  sixty  years 
ago  I  can  remember  hearing  him  argue  with  heat  and  at  length 
that  there  must  soon  be  a  tunnel  joining  England  and  France — 
rank  heresy  then.  He  was  intensely  religious,  one  of  the 
band  that  Father  gathered  round  him  as  teacher  and  leader. 
All  day  he  worked  in  his  office,  and  most  of  his  evenings  were 
spent  preaching  where  he  was  invited  to  preach.  He  was 
absolutely  sure  of  his  creed,  as  were  all  the  Evangelicals  of  that 
time.  The  second  advent  was  a  certainty  and  all  things 
pointed  to  its  nearness. 

I  was  rather  afraid  of  Mr.  Barton,  for  he  had  a  habit  of  asking 
us  boys  straight  and  awkward  questions — Were  we  converted  ? 
Had  we  accepted  Jesus?  And  since  I  knew  my  bones  ached 
during  the  more  than  two  hours'  Sunday  service,  preceded  by 
a  good  hour  and  a  half  of  Sunday  School,  also  with  hard  seating, 
I  did  not  feel  that  I  had  any  right  to  indulge  a  settled  conviction 
as  to  my  own  religious  state.  Father  never  asked  us  such 
questions,  and  Jack  Barton,  Mr.  Barton's  eldest  son  and  my 
chum,  fought  as  shy  of  questioning  as  I  did.  He  and  I  were 
close  friends.  We  helped  each  other  into,  and  not  always  out  of, 
many  a  scrape  in  early  days.  Our  paths  in  life  diverged.  He 
became  an  engineer  and,  under  Balfour's  regime  in  Ireland, 
did  such  able  work  during  the  '8o's  and  '90's  that  he  received 
Knighthood  at  the  hands  of  the  King. 


EARLIEST  MEMORIES  19 

Near  the  Bartons'  pew  sat  a  very  dashing  fellow  whom  we  all 
admired.  His  father,  though  he  could  ill  afford  it,  indulged  the 
family  pride  by  purchasing  for  him  a  cornet's  commission  in  a 
crack  cavalry  regiment — the  Carbineers,  and  lower  down,  on 
the  same  aisle,  sat  under  the  shadow  of  the  organ-loft  John 
Murphy.  I  wish  that  I  were  able  at  all  adequately  to  sketch 
my  true  friend,  John  Murphy.  To  him  I  owe  a  debt.  When  I 
first  knew  him  he  looked  a  soldier,  straight  and  strong.  He 
must  have  been  about  fifty.  He  might  have  been  one  of  Crom- 
well's Ironside  Captains,  living  in  a  later  day.  I  saw  his  bed- 
room once.  It  fitted  the  man.  A  hard,  narrow  cot;  no  cur- 
tains on  the  windows,  no  carpet  on  the  floor.  He  was  an 
Orangeman  and  an  uncompromising  enemy  of  popery  in  any 
shape.  His  tenants  were  Roman  Catholic  to  a  man,  and  the 
local  priests  had  more  than  once  denounced  him  from  the 
altar;  and  such  anathema  too  often  carried  with  it  very  grave 
consequences  indeed.  Unmoved,  unarmed,  John  Murphy 
went  his  way.  There  was  too  often  hard  feeling  between  land- 
lord and  tenant  then — often  something  worse;  but  his  tenants 
seemed  to  like  him.  He  was  a  magistrate,  too,  and  never  missed 
taking  his  duty  on  the  bench;  and  such  an  office  seldom  helped 
a  man's  popularity;  but  John  Murphy  was  so  absolutely  just 
that  he  won,  on  the  bench  and  off,  with  Catholic  and  Protestant 
alike,  respect  if  not  regard.  He  never  married,  and  lived  by 
himself,  two  miles  out  of  town.  His  friends  told  him  he  was 
sure  to  be  shot,  but  he  never  carried  arms  and  always  walked 
alone.  So  much  for  John  Murphy's  outside.  But,  oh !  how  kind 
and  fatherly  and  understanding  he  was  to  me,  a  boy.  Once 
one  of  my  boyhood  escapades  got  to  the  ears  of  the  police  (the 
Irish  Constabulary  knew  everything  you  did)  and  the  story 
got  to  him.  So  he  would  have  me  out  to  spend  the  night  in 
his  grim,  bare  house,  and  advise  me  what  and  what  not  to  do. 
There  was  a  searching  quality  in  his  clear,  gray  eyes — you  told 
him  the  whole  truth  and  trusted  him. 

He  won  my  boyish  confidence  by  giving  me  his  own.  When 
he  was  a  young  man  he  had  seriously  practised  mesmerism  and 
found  he  had  unusual  mesmeric  power.  Over  one  of  his  grooms 
he  had  gained  such  power  that,  even  when  the  man  was  alone, 
John  Murphy  noticed  he  would  do  unusual  things,  evidently 
quite  unconsciously  and  at  the   bidding  of  his  master's  un- 


20  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

spoken  will.  This  turn  of  affairs  alarmed  John  Murphy  and 
he  decided  there  and  then  never  again  to  mesmerize  any  one. 
This  happened,  he  told  me,  in  early  days,  before  his  conversion. 
He,  too,  took  cottage  meetings,  and,  like  Mr.  Barton,  went 
round  the  country  preaching  among  the  Protestants.  He  had 
not  Mr.  Barton's  eloquence,  but  he  knew  his  Bible  by  heart, 
and  the  pose  and  carriage  of  the  man  won  respect  and  accept- 
ance among  the  Orangemen  of  the  north.  He  never  spent 
anything  on  himself.  I  do  not  think  he  laid  any  money  by — 
his  one  purpose  was  to  lead  all  over  whom  he  had  any  influence 
into  personal  relations  with  a  God  and  Saviour  who  were  to  him : 

.     .  .    closer  than  breathing, 
Nearer  than  hands  and  feet. 

Another  face  from  the  old  church's  dim  interior:  Miss  Sheck- 
elton  lived  in  two  bare  but  very  clean  rooms  opposite  the  parish 
day  school.  She  was  small  and  old  and  not  especially  clever, 
but  where  she  went  she  brought  sunshine  with  her. 

"Woe  to  you  when  all  men  speak  well  of  you"  has  indisput- 
able authority  behind  it.  This  dear  old  saint  proved  that  to 
general  deductions  in  morals,  even  the  wisest  and  most  inclusive, 
there  are  exceptions.  No  one  ever  was  known  to  speak  evil  of 
Miss  Sheckelton.  With  inspired  tactfulness  she  went  about 
doing  good.  She  seemed  to  know  what  to  say,  and  when  to 
say  nothing.  Looking  back  now  on  my  boyhood  days,  I  can 
see  how  remarkable  a  woman  she  must  have  been  to  catch  my 
interest  and  fasten  herself  in  my  memory  as  she  certainly  did. 
She  was  young,  so  really  young.  "Whom  the  gods  love  die 
young" — ah,  no.  It  must  have  been  some  godly  Puritan 
divine,  with  scholarship  as  bad  as  his  complexion,  who  popular- 
ized that  libel  on  human  nature.  What  the  poet  really  said 
was:  "Those  whom  the  gods  love  stay  young  till  they  die." 

There  are  in  this  loud  stunning  tide, 

Of  human  care  and  crime, 
With  whom  the  melodies  abide 

Of  everlasting  chime; 
Who  carry  music  in  their  heart 

Through  dusky  lane  and  wrangling  mart, 
Plying  their  daily  task  with  busier  feet 

Because  their  secret  souls  a  holy  strain  repeat. 


EARLIEST  MEMORIES  21 

One  more  face,  old  and  weatherbeaten — the  face  of  a  sailor — 
I  looked  to  see  on  Sunday  with  more  lively  expectancy  than  I 
looked  for  any  of  the  others.  He  lived  in  a  small  cottage, 
only  two  rooms  to  it,  several  Irish  miles  away  on  the  moun- 
tainside, but  he  never  missed  church.  Wherever  Father  went 
preaching,  he  went,  though  he  never  attempted  an  address 
himself.  He  loved  to  talk  to  the  converts,  especially  the  young 
converts,  for  with  any  sort  of  a  boy  he  could  get  on.  When  I 
grew  old  enough  to  walk  the  distance,  I  would  drop  in  to  that 
little,  honeysuckle-covered  cottage  by  the  moorland  when  I 
was  out  for  long  rambles  with  my  gun.  On  its  wall  hung 
strange  dried  fishes  from  far-off  seas — great  sharks'  jaws  with 
many  rows  of  teeth,  hooked  tusks  of  the  sperm  whale,  and  the 
twisted  ivory  lance  of  the  narwhal.  Story  after  story  I  would 
draw  from  him  of  what  he  called  the  wild  days  of  his  youth. 
He  was  a  little  ashamed  of  them  but  I  could  see  he  liked  telling 
of  them,  too. 

The  old  church  held  about  eight  hundred  people.  These  I 
have  written  of  were  leaders  in  it,  and  they  and  many  others 
loved  Father  and  Mother  and  were  broken-hearted  when  we 
went  away,  in  1865,  to  London. 


CHAPTER  III 

Father  and  Mother 

Let  us  joyfully  recognize  all  men,  who,  with  whatever  imperfection 
of  doctrine  or  even  of  conduct,  contribute  materially  to  the  work  of  human 
improvement. — August  Comte. 

I  can  give  no  true  picture  of  my  father  and  mother,  I  can- 
not explain  the  atmosphere  and  environment  that  surrounded 
my  youth,  if  the  Evangelical  revival  were  left  out.  It  is  seldom 
referred  to  now,  but  it  is  well  worth  remembering.  The  one 
thing,  real  above  all  real  things  in  our  home,  was  Religion; 
and  Religion  meant  the  Puritan  Evangelicism  of  the  time. 
What  strange  banners  the  good  and  the  brave  in  all  the  ages 
have  chosen  to  fight  under!  Though  long  ago  these  banners 
have  been  furled  and  laid  aside,  let  us  reverently  salute 
them  still.  They  were  carried  by  brave  men.  Those  Irish 
Evangelicals  were  not,  it  is  true,  a  great  host,  but  they 
preached  the  truth  of  God  as  they  saw  it,  and  they  influenced 
their  time. 

In  their  band,  Father  was  a  leader.  He  had  a  fine  carrying 
voice.  He  had  an  Irishman's  eloquence,  and  he  profoundly 
believed  that  he  held  a  commission  to  declare  God's  truth 
to  men  whether  they  "would  hear  or  forbear."  So  he  had 
power  with  the  crowds  that  for  many  years  listened  to  him,  first 
in  Ireland  and  then  in  Belgrave  Square,  London. 

Doctor  Mahaffy,  Provost  of  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  has 
well  described  the  men  and  the  message  they  bore,  and  I  quote 
from  an  article  of  his  in  the  Hibbert  Journal  of  April,  1903.  I 
do  this  at  some  length,  for  if  my  own  life  story  is  to  be  helpful 
to  those  who  find  that  their  creeds  are  changing,  I  must  make 
it  clear  what  my  boyhood's  beliefs  were  and  from  what  I  broke 
away: 


FATHER  AND  MOTHER  23 

"The  great  Evangelical  Movement"  had  been  working  in  Dublin  ever 
since  the  opening  of  the  Nineteenth  Century.1  It  was  discountenanced  by  the 
bishops  and  the  fashionable  clergy,  and  did  not  become  dominant  till  the 
very  tactless  rule  of  Archbishop  Whately  threw  a  vast  number  of  the  rich 
laity  into  the  movement,  who  built  free  chapels,  not  under  the  Archbishop's 
control,  and  filled  them  with  able  popular  preachers.2  They  emptied  the 
parish  churches  and  monopolized  the  religious  teaching  of  the  Protestant 
population. 

The  popular  preachers  of  Dublin  in  1850  differed  from  the  early  Puritans 
in  that  these  thought  an  accurate  knowledge  of  the  original  Bible  essential, 
while  their  descendants  were  quite  content  with  the  Authorized  Version. 
But  so  convinced  were  they  of  the  vital  importance  of  scripture,  that  I  have 
actually  heard  a  clergyman  on  a  platform  assert  the  verbal  inspiration  of  the 
English  Bible,  on  the  ground  that  the  same  influence  which  guided  the  pens 
of  the  original  writers  could  not  have  failed  to  guide,  in  the  same  manner, 
translators  who  were  to  make  known  to  the  English  nation  the  message  of  the 
Gospel.  Regarding  then  the  Bible,  as  they  understood  it,  as  the  absolute 
rule  of  faith,  they  nevertheless  acquiesced  in  the  formularies  and  ritual  of  the 
Church  of  England.  They  never  quarreled  with  the  Book  of  Common 
Prayer:  they  read  through  the  service  devotedly — even  the  Athanasian  Creed 
received  its  due  place — but  the  service  was  but  a  long  prelude  to  the  real  work 
of  the  day,  the  sermon.  For  this  purpose  the  minister  retired,  and  reap- 
peared in  the  lofty  pulpit  in  a  black  preaching  gown  and  bands. 

In  his  discourse  it  was  his  absolute  duty  to  set  forth  the  whole  Gospel  (as 
he  understood  it)  so  that  any  stray  person,  or  any  member  of  the  congrega- 
tion in  a  contrite  condition,  might  then  and  there  attain  conversion  (which 
was  always  sudden)  and  find  peace.  These  men  were  all  Calvinists,  as  their 
forefathers  had  been;  they  were  distinctly  anti-ritualists.  The  doctrine  of 
justification  by  faith  was  the  cardinal  point  of  their  teaching.  .  .  . 
They  did  not  hesitate  to  preach  that  all  those  who  had  not  embraced  the 
dogma  of  justification  by  faith  were  doomed  to  eternal  perdition.  They  be- 
lieved as  strongly  as  Massilon  in  "the  small  number  of  the  elect."  They 
were  not  afraid  to  insist  on  the  eternity  and  very  maximum  of  torture.  On 
the  other  hand,  they  had  the  firmest  belief  in  the  future  bliss  of  those  who 
were  saved,  and  upon  their  deathbeds  looked  forward  with  confidence  to  an 
immediate  reunion  with  the  saints  who  had  gone  before.  They  had  strong 
hopes  of  seeing  visions  of  Glory  on  their  deathbeds. 

They  lived  saintly  lives,  though  they  inveighed  against  the  value  of  good 
works.  They  controlled  their  congregations  as  spiritual  autocrats,  though 
they  denied  all  efficiency  in  Apostolic  Succession.  They  were  excellent  and 
able  men,  proclaiming  a  creed  that  has  over  and  over  again  produced  great 

xIt  is  more  correct  to  say  since  1780.  See  "Cambridge  Modern  History,"  Vol.  vi.  81-89. 
Doctor  Mahaffy  also  fails  to  emphasize  (probably  from  lack  of  space)  the  humanitarian  influence 
of  the  movement.  To  it  chiefly  was  due  England's  splendid  and  far-seeing  protest  against  the 
Slave  trade,  her  suppression  of  it  in  her  own  Dominions,  and  her  protest  against  it  everywhere. 
— W.  S.  R. 

2  My  father  was  chaplain  at  one  of  these,  the  Molineux  asylum  in  Dublin,  before  he  came 
toDundalk.— W.  S.  R. 


24  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

and  noble  types  of  men,  though  most  philosophers  would  pronounce  it  a  cruel 
and  even  immoral  parody  of  the  teachings  of  the  Saviour. 

Doctor  Mahaffy  might  have  added  that  the  majority  of  these 
men  believed  and  preached  in  the  imminence  of  the  second 
coming  of  Jesus  and  the  gathering  to  Him  of  His  saints  in  the 
air,  which  belief  indeed  St.  Paul,  in  his  earliest  teachings,  held, 
as  we  see  by  the  first  of  his  epistles  (I  and  II  Thessalonians) — 
a  belief  he  evidently  modified  if  he  did  not  abandon  later. 

The  Evangelicals  had,  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  saved  the 
cause  of  real  religion  in  England.  Witfield  and  Wesley,  loyal 
members  of  the  national  church,  had,  till  they  were  driven  forth 
from  her  fold,  done  all  that  men  could  do  to  bring  about  neces- 
sary reforms.  They  had  gone  to  the  poor,  the  neglected  masses 
of  the  land,  and  had  won  multitudes  to  a  real  religious  faith. 
In  the  best  sense  of  the  term,  they  were  religious  Democrats. 
The  Evangelicals  of  the  Nineteenth  Century  were  their  spiritual 
heirs.  They,  too,  protested  against  the  worldliness,  ignorance, 
and  supineness  of  the  national  church;  and  when  all  preferment 
was  denied  them,  they  went  outside  Episcopal  boundaries, 
preaching  on  the  streets  and  in  the  cottages  of  the  poor. 

The  Roman  Church  usually  burned  her  reformers,  but  some- 
times, as  in  the  case  of  St.  Francis,  she  had  the  wit  to  canonize 
them.  The  English  Church  never  burned  hers,  but  uniformly 
she  ignored  and  repressed  them;  and  from  a  religious  point  of 
view,  who  shall  say  that  repression  was  not  in  the  end  more 
fatal  to  her  own  life  than  if  she  had  sent  them  to  the  stake?  If 
only,  when  Wesley  and  his  saintly  band  had  risen  in  protest 
against  her  sloth,  her  gross  materialism,  and  her  slavish  obe- 
dience to  the  corruption  of  the  time,  she  had  listened  and  re- 
pented! If,  instead  of  driving  Wesley  forth  from  the  church  he 
loved,  she  had  given  him  a  seat  among  the  Bishops,  and  set  him 
free  to  preach  the  Gospel  from  John  o'  Groate  House  to  Land's 
End,  what  new  life,  what  splendid  religious  and  national  en- 
largement might  she  not  have  won!  What  weakness,  shame, 
and  division  might  she  not  have  escaped! 

The  revival  in  the  Eighteenth  Century  had  its  main  root  in 
England.  In  the  Nineteenth,  it  began  in  Scotland,  spread  to 
Ireland,  and,  in  a  modified  form,  later  influenced  England  pro- 
foundly.   In  England,  however,  its  doctrinal  forms  were  modi- 


FATHER  AND  MOTHER  25 

fied.  The  weakness  of  the  movement  lay  in  its  crude  dogma- 
tism; its  power  in  its  appeal  to  the  masses  of  the  people 
neglected  by  the  churches.  The  Evangelicals  offered  men 
"God's  plan  of  salvation."  God  had  done  it  all;  there  re- 
mained nothing  for  man  to  do  but  accept  the  finished  work  of 
Jesus.     Lowell  put  this  theory  of  Grace  in  the  lines: 

Tis  Heaven  alone  that  is  given  away, 
Tis  only  God  may  be  had  for  the  asking. 

Salvation  was  an  arrangement  entered  into  between  the 
persons  of  the  Trinity;  all  man  had  to  do  was  to  believe  and 
accept  it.  It  was  a  system  of  theological  arithmetic  so  direct 
and  simple  that  any  could  understand  it.  One  of  the  most 
popular  hymns  of  the  time  ran  thus: 

Cast  your  deadly  doings  down, 

Down  at  Jesus'  feet. 
Stand  in  Him  and  Him  alone, 

Gloriously  complete. 


And  again: 


Doing  is  a  deadly  thing, 
Doing  ends  in  death. 


It  may  seem  strange  that  a  doctrine  so  crude,  so  contrary 
to  man's  experience,  should  have  been  accepted  by  multitudes, 
but  accepted  it  was.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  was  not  more  un- 
reasonable than  was  Luther's  of  Justification  by  Faith,  and  both 
seemed  to  have  the  sanction  and  authority  of  great  names,  from 
St.  Paul's  time  to  our  own.  Good  men  who  had  little  learning 
and  no  knowledge  of  history  saw  in  it  an  understandable  way  of 
getting  rid  of  their  sins  and  drawing  near  to  their  God.  The 
aim  was  a  true  aim,  the  instinct  sincerely  religious;  and  since 
this  was  the  all-important  matter,  the  cause  of  spiritual  religion 
was  for  the  time  being  advanced.  Men  who  knew  themselves 
heavily  burdened,  as  was  Pilgrim,  saw  again  the  great  sin-bear- 
ing brother  take  on  Himself  their  intolerable  load.  And  like 
Pilgrim  when  his  burden  tumbled  from  his  shoulders,  they 
stepped  out  bravely  on  the  narrow  way  that  led  to  the  far-off 
Celestial  City. 

Looking  back  on  these  days  of  hope  and  faith,  many  who 
took  part  in  them  know,  all  too  surely,  that  the  business  of 


26  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

saving  souls  and  of  helping  on  the  Kingdom  of  God  on  Earth  is 
not  so  simple  a  matter.  Though  it  had  no  adequate  vision  of 
a  Kingdom  of  God  on  Earth,  though  its  belief  in  the  end  of  the 
"dispensation,"  the  nearness  of  Christ's  coming,  and  the 
rapture  of  the  saints  tended  to  make  it  careless  of  social  reforms, 
it  stood  for  a  real  thing,  for  another  effort  of  poor  human  nature 
to  "arise  and  go  to  its  Father."  It  was  followed  by  reaction, 
of  course;  all  religious  movements  have  been;  but  it  did  good, 
drew  men  of  all  classes  together,  and  as  to  its  experiences  and 
beliefs — who  shall  say?  Perhaps  to  our  children's  children 
some  of  the  things  we  think  about  God  and  sin  and  salvation 
will  seem  as  crude  and  unacceptable  as  does  the  revivalist's 
gospel  of  fifty  years  ago  to  us  to-day. 

It  has  become  the  fashion  to  belittle  those  men,  the  work 
they  did,  and  the  message  they  delivered.  But  there  is  a  debt 
owing  to  them,  and  a  large  debt.  In  the  hymnology  of  the 
Eighteenth  Century,  and  the  first  three  quarters  of  the  Nine- 
teenth, the  Evangelicals  left  us  a  precious  legacy.  If  poetry 
is  the  evidence  of  vitality  in  any  movement,  then  those  men 
possessed  it.  In  the  hymns  of  Watts,  Charles  Wesley,  and 
Cooper  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  and  of  Kelly,  Heber,  Lyte, 
and  Neale  in  the  Nineteenth,  just  to  name  a  very  few,  those 
Evangelicals  gave  to  our  time,  and  bequeathed  to  succeeding 
times,  a  heritage  that  is  priceless. 

The  Roman  Catholic  Church  boasts  its  Newman  and  Faber, 
but  the  two  or  three  great  hymns  of  theirs  that  will  hold  their 
place  for  ever  owe  their  inspiration,  not  to  the  Hierarchy  those 
men  submitted  to,  but  to  the  spirit  of  the  church  and  party 
they  abandoned.  They  wrote  them  before  they  left  the 
Anglican  Church. 

How  much  of  hymns  ancient  and  modern  will  live?  Just 
the  part  borrowed  from  the  Evangelicals.  Since  their  time, 
neither  the  English  national  church  nor  the  Protestant  churches 
in  England  or  anywhere  else,  nor  the  "sectlets"  that  have 
sprung  up  mushroom-like  in  a  night,  have  produced  any  hymns 
as  good.     Nay,  they  have  failed  to  produce  any  hymns  at  all. 

If  this  seems  too  sweeping  a  statement,  take  the  index  of  any 
good  hymnal;  study  the  names  and  dates  of  the  authors  of 
those  hymns  we  love  ourselves  and  teach  our  children,  and  you 
will  find  that  ninety-five  per  cent,  of  them  were  written  by  the 


FATHER  AND  MOTHER  27 

men  whose  lives  were  changed  and  uplifted  by  the  evangelical 
revivals  of  the  Eighteenth  and  Nineteenth  centuries. 

Dogmatism  limited  the  Evangelicals,  but  their  failure  arose 
from  also  another  grave  error.  They  failed  to  enter  into  and  to 
sympathize  with  the  spirit  of  their  time. 

The  winter  is  past,  the  rain  is  over  and  gone;  the  flowers  appear  on  the 
earth;  the  time  of  the  singing  of  birds  is  come,  and  the  voice  of  the  turtle  is 
heard  in  the  land;  the  fig  tree  putteth  forth  her  green  figs,  and  the  vines  with 
the  tender  grape  give  a  good  smell.  Arise,  my  love,  my  fair  one,  and  come 
away. — Song  of  Solomon,  ii,  11,  12,  13. 

So  sang  an  immortal  lover,  three  thousand  years  or  more  ago. 
And  in  the  last  half  of  the  Nineteenth  Century,  in  many  lands — 
in  English-speaking  lands  especially — there  was  a  new  spring- 
time in  the  hearts  of  men.  In  scholarship,  architecture,  poetry, 
literature,  science,  a  new  spirit  sought  expression.  It  cared 
nothing  for  a  religion  of  "other- wo rldliness";  and  the  other- 
worldliness  of  Evangelism  debarred  it  from  understanding  and 
entering  into  the  spirit  of  that  time. 

The  general  assembly  of  the  Presbyterian  churches  in  Ire- 
land made,  in  1837,  a  pronouncement:  "Amusements  and  all 
parties  the  object  of  which  is  simply  pleasure  ought  to  be 
abandoned."  With  this  wholesale  condemnation  of  one  of  the 
essential  needs  of  human  nature,  the  men  I  have  been  writing 
of  thoroughly  agreed;  and  with  the  result  that  a  stamp  of  gloom 
and  unnatural  restraint  was  increasingly  attached  to  evangeli- 
cal religion.  Thoughtful  people  began  to  see  that  it  em- 
phasized the  visionary  and  ignored  the  actual;  that  if  it  had 
spiritual  yearnings,  it  had  no  social  outlook;  that,  in  limiting 
the  meaning  of  salvation,  it  had  unconsciously  distorted  the 
teachings  of  Jesus;  for  nothing  about  that  teaching  was  more 
certain  than  that  the  Kingdom  of  God,  as  He  preached  it,  was 
meant  to  have  a  very  real  and  actual  expression  here  on  earth, 
first  in  a  reformed  individual,  and  then  in  a  transformed  social 
order. 

No  one  had  heard  of  Nietzsche  in  those  days,  but  that  great 
radical  would  have  found  many  of  his  ideas  as  to  what  was  due 
to  children  practised  in  our  home  had  he  had  the  good  fortune 
to  visit  it. 


28  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Father  and  Mother  were  Law,  Light,  and  Love  to  us.  Home 
was  meant  to  be  everything  and  it  was  everything  to  me.  There 
were  no  distractions,  no  amusements,  outside  it.  We  were 
eight  children;  we  formed  a  sort  of  unconscious  Kindergarten 
of  our  own.  We  had  to  get  together  and  get  on  together,  for 
there  were  no  other  children  to  get  on  with.  I  remember  when 
there  were  six  of  us,  we  all  slept  side  by  side  in  narrow  beds  in 
one  big  nursery.  When  the  seventh  came,  I  was  sent  up  to  the 
attic,  and  I  did  not  approve  the  move,  for  it  was  lonely  and  cold 
up  there. 

What  was  true  of  our  home  was  true  of  many  others.  Large 
families  were  the  rule,  and  the  large  family  has  possibilities 
of  education  of  the  greatest  value.  Like  a  covey  of  partridges, 
the  children  are  dependent  on  their  own  crowding  for  common 
warmth  and  comfort.  All  too  soon  Life  scatters  the  covey, 
but  the  birds  can  take  the  better  care  of  themselves,  and  of  their 
progeny  when  parentage  comes  to  them,  for  that  earliest  ex- 
perience of  communal  life. 

Father  and  Mother  ruled  our  home.  Hours  were  kept 
punctually;  no  one  dreamed  of  being  late  for  a  meal  or  for  family 
prayer,  with  which  each  day  began  and  ended.  Obedience  was 
not  a  hardship,  it  was  a  matter  of  course.  We  all  had  to  do 
things  for  each  other,  and  did  them,  especially  for  Father  and 
Mother,  willingly.  If  I  was  good  I  was  allowed  to  help  Mother 
in  her  morning  gardening.  She  rose  at  six  to  do  it,  as  long  as 
she  had  any  health  at  all. 

I  contrast  the  memories  of  my  home  with  what  I  see  on  all 
hands  in  families  to-day.  Children  are  taught  chiefly  to  do 
things  for  themselves;  to  express  themselves,  to  find  their  own 
true  selves.  All  trash  and  humbug,  half  science,  pseudo  science, 
nothing  else!  Of  course  the  aim  of  every  enlightened  parent  is 
to  help  the  child  to  find  itself,  to  be  its  best  self;  so  only  can  it 
succeed.  This  is  the  aim  of  true  education.  There  is  not, 
there  cannot  be,  there  never  has  been  any  other  aim.  The 
vital  question  is  how  to  attain  it. 

If,  even  in  earliest  infancy,  the  very  babies  are  taught  to 
assert  themselves,  to  express  their  own  view  of  things,  to  have 
their  own  way,  one  of  two  things  must  happen.  Either  the 
child  wins  out  and  the  parent  gives  in,  or  parental  authority  is 
attained  only  at  the  cost  of  perpetual  argument  and  dispute. 


FATHER  AND  MOTHER  29 

All  nature  cries  out  against  such  an  idea  of  child  training.  What 
is  the  stored-up  experience  of  the  parent  for?  That  precious 
heritage,  handed  down  through  the  ages,  so  painfully  acquired 
and  retained?  What  is  it  but  a  trust  for  the  child?  Acquired 
knowledge,  experience,  and  care  all  surround  it.  These  form  the 
nest  where  the  little  things  are  brooded  over;  where,  in  warmth 
and  safety,  they  are  housed  till  flying  time  comes  and  life  bids 
the  use  of  the  wings  that  parental  love  has  strengthened  and 
trained. 

Use  of  the  wings  comes  soon  enough,  comes  inevitably. 
For  pity's  sake,  for  childhood's  sake,  don't  let  us  be  guilty  of 
the  folly  which  no  swallow  or  sparrow  could  commit;  don't  push 
life  over  the  nest  edge  till  you  have  done  your  part  to  teach  it 
life's  true  values.  What  possible  value  has  the  judgment  of  a 
child,  say,  of  four  years?  Yet  how  commonly  I  have  been 
forced  to  look  on  the  folly,  nay,  the  tragedy,  of  a  poor,  ignorant, 
theorizing  mother  arguing  with  her  four-year-old  little  one. 
Ah,  I  have  so  often  watched  in  following  years  the  result  in 
families  known  to  me.  There  was  no  "nest"  idea  in  the 
parents'  mind,  and  so  no  such  idea  ever  dawned  in  the  children's 
mind.  The  fathers  were  absorbed  in  business,  the  mothers 
had  compelling  social  engagements.  Nurses  and  new  theories 
of  child  culture,  half  understood  or  not  understood  at  all, 
worked  evilly.  The  growing  intimacy  of  the  child  with  both 
parents  was  impossible.  And  so  the  divinely  intended,  supreme 
value  of  parent  to  child  and  of  child  to  parent  was  never  known 
to  either. 

So  far  as  the  communal  side  of  education  goes,  the  children 
of  the  poor  have  an  advantage  over  the  children  of  the  rich. 
Life's  actualities,  in  their  case,  cannot  be  escaped;  there  are  all- 
important  things  that  must  be  done,  and  there  are  definite 
times  for  doing  them  The  child  falls  into  the  habit  of  doing 
them,  for  it  has  to,  and  gains  in  the  doing.  The  poor  man's 
child  cannot  stop  to  argue  the  point  before  it  has  reached  the 
time  in  its  life  when  its  opinions  are  of  value;  for  if  it  does,  it  is 
pushed  on  one  side  by  its  more  intelligent  child  competitors. 
It  soon  finds  it  must  yield  to  the  communal  rule  in  life's  school, 
or  its  place  is  at  the  foot  of  the  class.  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say, 
and  I  do  not  speak  as  a  mere  theorist,  that  in  the  United  States 
to-day,  the  poor  man's  child  at  ten  years  old,  who  has  attended 


30  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

the  public  school,  is  further  on  the  road  to  good  citizenship 
than  is  the  child  of  the  rich  man.  It  stands  to  gain  a  truer 
view  of  its  place  in  life,  a  far  better  knowledge  of  other  children, 
and  to  learn  one  all-important  lesson,  the  lesson  of  obedience, 
by  the  things  it  has  suffered,  if  by  no  other  way.  It  learns 
helpfulness,  too,  for  all  in  the  household  of  the  poor  must  help 
or  suffer.  Its  pleasures  can  only  be  had  in  so  far  as  it  guides 
itself  by  the  laws  of  association.  It  must  associate  with  its 
fellows  or  go  without  games.  Here,  as  illustrating  what  home- 
making  can  be  among  the  very  poor,  I  will  tell  a  story  that  I 
could  not  tell  in  St.  George's  pulpit,  for  members  of  the  family 
I  now  write  of  were  present  in  the  congregation.  I  knew  one 
little  woman  (four  feet  nine  inches)  who  came  to  the  United 
States  thirty  years  ago  with  her  husband  and  five  little  children. 
As  soon  as  they  landed  the  man  was  stricken  with  blindness. 
She  had  to  work  for  all,  and  she  did.  They  were  often  hungry, 
but  she  brought  them  all  up.  The  boys  have  done  well.  One 
of  the  girls  is  a  successful  dramatic  author.  A  few  years  ago  all 
the  children  and  the  mother  and  father  dined  together  on  her 
birthday.  After  dinner  the  mother  said:  "This  is  my  sixty- 
fourth  birthday — the  first  easy  year  of  my  life.  I  thank  God 
that  he  helped  me  to  bear  and  bring  up  good  children.  I  feel  a 
little  tired  now;  I  will  go  and  lie  down."  She  went  to  her  bed 
and  did  not  leave  it,  dying  peacefully  in  a  few  days.  How  sloth- 
ful and  meaningless  do  many  lives  seem  by  contrast  with  such 
lifelong  heroism ! 

Certain  things  were  not  tolerated  in  our  home;  on  them  there 
could  be  no  discussion.  Untruthfulness,  disobedience,  were 
first.  Cowardice,  idleness,  and  cruelty  to  animals  or  neglect  of 
our  pets  were  a  good  second. 

My  memory  of  those  very  early  years  is  far  clearer  than  of 
happenings  in  later  times,  but  I  can  only  recall  one  act  of 
deliberate  disobedience  and  one  lie  I  told,  and  the  burning 
shame  of  both  faults  I  can  remember  still. 

You  ask,  can  such  relations  between  parents  and  children  be 
established  and  maintained  in  these  days  ?  Of  course  they  can. 
I  have  seen  more  of  our  modern  life  than  most  men.  I  have 
been  consulted  by  many  parents,  and  I  know  intimately  some 
homes  where  still  the  balance  of  things,  as  I  remember  them  in 
my  own  home,  is  maintained;  where  parents  live  before  all 


FATHER  AND  MOTHER  31 

things  for  their  children,  and  the  children  begin  life  under  wise 
and  loving  discipline.  Such  are  before  all  others  happy  and 
successful  homes.  The  children  "rise  up  to  call  such  parents 
blessed,"  though  in  creed  and  custom  they  may  have  made  far 
departure  since  childhood's  days.  They  realize  that  the  one 
thing,  the  supremely  important  thing  they  then  learned,  was  a 
true  attitude  to  life,  and  in  that  they  found  lasting  happiness  and 
usefulness. 

In  educational  methods,  of  course,  we  have  greatly  im- 
proved. Young  people  have  a  knowledge  (sometimes  rather 
too  superficial)  of  things  we  had  no  opportunity  to  know  any- 
thing about  sixty  years  ago.  Teaching  is  better  done.  The 
individual  capacities  of  the  child  are  discovered  and  developed. 
All  fine,  and  as  it  should  be;  but  the  real  thing  after  all  is  to  give 
the  child  a  true  spirit.  Everything  else  is  secondary — given 
that,  and  ultimate  failure  is  unlikely.  Fail  in  that,  and  all  is 
failure.  Somewhere  Stevenson  has  put  what  I  am  trying  to  say 
with  beauty  and  power:  "A  dogma  changed  is  a  new  error,  the 
old  form  is  probably  better;  but  a  spirit  imparted  is  a  perpetual 
possession." 

I  suppose  I  must  have  been  punished  sometimes,  but  I  have 
no  recollection  of  it — we  certainly  were  never  struck — but  to 
dispute  for  an  instant  the  discipline  of  the  home  never  oc- 
curred to  us.  We  were  taught  to  have  no  secrets  from  Father 
and  Mother;  taught  that,  in  little  troubles  or  big,  they  wanted 
to  know  all  about  it,  and  would  help  us  out;  and  the  custom  of 
going  to  them  about  everything  became  firmly  established. 
In  these  two  important  respects,  little  punishment  and  much 
cooperation  and  confidence,  I  think  our  home  was  unlike 
and  in  advance  of  most  other  homes,  and  that  Father  and 
Mother  were  the  most  wise,  tender,  and  patient  parents  I  ever 
knew. 

The  evenings  we  looked  forward  to.  Then  we  all  sat  round 
the  fire  in  the  drawing  room.  Father  and  Mother  sang  to  us 
(Mother  had  a  sweet  alto  voice)  and  told  us  stories.  Then, 
as  we  grew  bigger,  Father  read  to  us,  except  when  he  had  to  go 
preaching  (which  we  resented).  And  later  still  we,  as  well  as 
our  parents,  sang.  My  eldest  sister,  Sarah  (afterward  Mrs. 
Herbert  Watney),  led  us.     She  had  a  soprano  voice. 

Father  read  delightfully,  explaining  as  he  went.     What  an 


32  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

introduction  he  gave  us  to  "Robinson  Crusoe,"  "The  Swiss 
Family  Robinson,"  and  then  to  "Pilgrim's  Progress!"  With 
Bunyan  he  was  specially  at  home,  and  long  questionings  we 
had,  some  of  them  doubtful,  as  to  the  fitting  parts  played  by 
the  great  and  diverse  company  in  that  immortal  epic  of  man's 
religious  life.  When  we  were  done  with  Pilgrim,  Father  took 
up  Christiana;  but  she  and  her  children  never  thrilled  us  as 
Pilgrim  did,  though  we  did  love  Mr.  Greatheart. 

We  were  poor  in  those  early  Dundalk  days.  I  learned 
afterward  that  the  family  income  was  just  $1500 — not  much 
on  which  to  feed  and  clothe  and  educate  eight  children — but 
it  was  so  managed  that  we  did  not  feel  poor.  There  was  al- 
ways money  to  relieve  the  distress  of  our  neighbours.  We 
raised  our  own  vegetables,  had  a  cow,  chickens,  and  pigs,  and 
Father  and  Mother  between  them  did  even  such  rough  work  as 
salting  down  the  bacon.  I  remember  we  thought  Mother  a 
wonderful  cook;  anything  that  was  unusually  nice  she  made  for 
us  herself,  and  she  made  most  of  our  clothes. 

Looking  back  on  those  years  now,  from  1855  to  1865,  I  can 
see  that  the  strain  on  my  mother  was  more  than  even  her 
fine  constitution  and  indomitable  courage  could  endure.  She 
gave  her  very  life  for  the  home.  Her  babies  came  too  closely, 
one  after  the  other;  her  sewing  took  all  her  evenings,  her  careful 
housekeeping  and  cooking  her  days.  Her  garden,  while  any 
vigour  remained  to  her,  was  her  delight  and  recreation.  But 
when  I  was  about  ten  years  old,  she  gradually  had  to  give  up 
gardening.  Arthritis,  that  later  made  her  life  a  martyrdom, 
began  to  fasten  its  grip  on  her  frail  little  body,  and  she  was 
never  afterward  free  from  cruel  pain  till  she  died  in  1887. 

My  father,  Marcus  Rainsford,  was  an  unworldly,  simple- 
minded  man.  Irish  schools  in  his  day  were  inadequate  in- 
stitutions, and  one  of  these  in  Dublin  he  attended.  In  due 
course  he  entered  Trinity  College,  and,  with  some  difficulty, 
achieved  a  B.  A.  degree.  He  was  born  at  Rainsford  Lodge, 
County  Wicklow,  and  inherited  that  unpretentious  house  and  a 
small  and  encumbered  estate  from  my  grandfather,  Ryland 
Rainsford.  He  was  a  lover  of  nature,  though  of  natural  history, 
except  what  he  had  picked  up  for  himself,  he  knew  nothing. 
He  loved  a  horse  and  was  an  excellent  judge  of  his  points.  In 
boyhood,  he  hunted  with  the  "Kildare,"  a  famous  pack  then, 


FATHER  AND  MOTHER  33 

and  he  told  me,  when  he  gave  me  my  first  mount  on  a  donkey, 
that  he  went  to  his  first  "meet  of  hounds"  on  the  same  humble 
steed.  He  was  a  first-class  horseman,  hands  and  seat  of  the 
best,  and  could,  years  after,  when  he  had  long  given  up  the 
hunting  field  as  a  worldly  and  sinful  amusement,  still  take  a 
horse  over  a  good-sized  gate  and  hold  two  pennies,  one  under 
each  knee,  without  losing  them. 

When  Vicar  of  Dundalk,  he  would  groom  his  own  horse 
and  see  to  it  that  I  did  the  same  for  my  pony.1 

He  came  honestly  by  his  love  for  a  good  horse,  and  one  family 
story  in  this  line  is  worth  repeating.  An  ancestor  of  ours  held 
Brigade  rank  under  Wellington  in  Spain,  and  prided  himself 
on  his  Irish  "chargers."  At  Salamanca  his  "galloper"  had  his 
horse  shot  under  him.  The  Brigadier  had,  for  the  time  being, 
to  remount  him  on  his  own  spare  horse.  The  engagement  was 
very  heavy  and  the  French  fire  close  and  deadly.  Looking 
through  the  smoke,  the  Brigadier  saw  with  fury  that  his  young 
"aid"  had  turned  sideways  to  the  fire,  and  so  sat  his  horse 
broadside  on  to  it.  "Damn  you,  sir,"  he  roared,  "what  do 
you  mean  by  turning  my  horse's  flank  to  such  a  fire  as  this? 
Face  the  enemy,  sir!" 

He  loved  gardening,  too,  and  was  always  at  work  among  his 
flowers  and  vegetables  long  before  we  had  breakfast,  and  we 
breakfasted  early.  Later,  when  our  means  were  not  so  strait- 
ened and  he  could  afford  a  man  of  all  work,  he  confined  himself 
to  his  roses.  These  were  his  joy  and  pride.  He  grew  standard 
roses,  budding  varieties  from  England  and  France  on  wild 
hedgerow  stock.  These  I  used  to  dig  up  and  bring  to  him  from 
the  countryside  and  he  would  give  me  a  shilling  a  dozen  for 
them.  So  the  old,  neglected  Vicarage  garden  became  a  beauti- 
ful thing  to  see,  for  no  one  in  Dundalk  raised  such  roses  as  he 
did. 

Father  had  the  gift  of  making  and  keeping  friends.  Inter- 
esting people  came  to  the  house;  missionaries  from  far-off  lands 
were  always  welcome.  One  of  these  I  specially  remember 
came  straight  from  Abyssinia,  and  told  us  stories  of  lions  and 


1  I  should  say  here  that  Father  made  himself  responsible  for  some  quite  large  debts  incurred 
by  my  grandfather,  which  he  was  not  legally  bound  to  pay.  Morally,  he  felt  he  was  bound,  and 
the  payment  of  these  moneys  kept  us  very  poor  during  the  early  years  of  his  tenure  of  Dundalk 
parish. 


34  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

elephants.  He  also  left  with  Father  an  ancient  copy  of  the 
Coptic  version  of  the  New  Testament.  To  him  I  owe  my  first 
boyhood's  yearning  to  see  strange  lands. 

Religion  was  everything  to  my  parents.  In  daily  life  they 
consistently  presented  its  beautiful  reality  to  their  children. 
They  lived  in  the  company  of  a  God  they  loved  and  trusted. 
The  incongruity  of  the  doctrines  they  held  with  the  life  they 
lived  and  the  love  they  gave  was  of  course  not  apparent  to  me 
till  long  after.  To  them  the  Bible  was  not  a  "word  of  God," 
one  among  many  words,  but  the  Word  of  God,  from  the  first 
letter  to  the  last,  His  inspired  and  inerrant  message  to  men; 
and  in  it  we  children  were  schooled  as  soon  as  we  could  under- 
stand English;  and  thankful  I  am  for  that  rule  of  my  home.  I 
never  had  anything  better  than  a  smattering  of  Latin  and  an 
imperfect  knowledge  of  New  Testament  Greek,  but  with  the 
greatest  religious  poetry  in  the  world,  given  us  in  an  unequalled 
prose,  that  cultivates  the  taste  and  satisfies  the  ear,  I  was  very 
thoroughly  acquainted  when  I  was  ordained.  It  was  the  only 
thing  I  did  know  well,  and  that  invaluable  knowledge  I  owe  to 
my  mother. 

Stevenson  is  everlastingly  right:  Religion  is  a  spirit  im- 
parted, not  a  dogma  handed  down.  What  misery,  hatred,  and 
blood-shedding  had  been  spared  the  world  if  the  difference  had 
been  recognized. 

We  children  were  taught: 

i.     That  the  nature  of  all  men  born  of  Adam  was  altogether 
vile;  no  particle  of  good  in  it. 

2.  That  the  world  we  lived  in  was  under  God's  curse  and 

was  to  be  burned  up. 

3.  That  it  was  God's  eternal  purpose  to  save  a  few  out  of  it. 

4.  That  the  great  majority  of  its  inhabitants  were  destined 

to  suffer  eternally  in  a  real  hell  fire. 

People  no  longer  believe  these  awful  doctrines,  you  say.  Why 
repeat  them?  Why  dwell  on  the  darker  side  of  a  religious 
movement  which  you  confess  had  much  good  in  it  and  pro- 
foundly benefited  its  time?  I  do  so  because,  as  I  said  in  the 
introduction  to  this  life  story,  one  of  my  chief  reasons  for  writing 
it  is  to  insist  on  the  comparative  unimportance  of  creeds  and 
doctrines.     If  true  religion  is  to  live,  and  men  cannot  live  with- 


FATHER  AND  MOTHER  35 

out  it,  their  creeds  must  change  and  doctrines  once  precious 
and  useful  perish. 

The  God  who  indwells  man — the  Holy  Spirit,  ever  living, 
ever  in  action — pushes  aside,  transcends,  finally  destroys,  those 
forms  of  words  in  which  successive  generations  have  sought, 
piously  but  vainly,  to  find  a  final  expression  for  His  voice.  So 
much  is  inevitable.  The  Kingdom  of  good  and  of  God  can 
come  by  no  other  way.  Jesus  said  the  Gospel  he  preached  was 
a  seed — a  growing,  expanding  thing — Truth  to  be  sown  and 
re-sown,  not  to  be  husbanded  in  ecclesiastical  granaries. 

Not  in  the  doctrines  they  held  lay  my  parents'  power — and 
power  they  had.  Not  to  one  of  those  doctrines  could  I  sub- 
scribe now.  Yet  well  I  know  that  anything  I  am,  anything 
worth  while  that  I  have  done,  I  owe  to  the  spirit  they  imparted, 
which  indeed  was  a  perpetual  possession. 

Facing  the  light,  I  point  above  and  prove 
There  is  a  place  no  storms  nor  seasons  move. 
So  hold  I  steadfast  in  their  ordered  way, 
The  falling  shadows  of  a  fleeting  day. 


CHAPTER  IV 

Schooldays 

I  had  poor  luck  in  the  matter  of  schools.  I  never  attended  a 
really  good  one.  My  first  was  the  Dundalk  Grammar  School; 
there  was  no  other  to  go  to.  It  was  an  ancient  foundation  fallen 
into  decay.  The  Head  was  a  good  classical  scholar  of  Trinity, 
Dublin,  a  well-meaning  man,  but  unfitted  for  his  work — 
harassed,  too,  I  fear,  by  poverty.  The  assistant  masters  were 
gathered  from  anywhere.  Poor  devils,  teaching  boys  they 
did  not  care  for  in  order  to  make  a  bare  living,  and  that  was 
all  they  made. 

In  the  matter  of  punishments  we  were  better  off  than  were 
most  scholars,  for  in  those  days  caning  on  hands  and  back  was 

often  inflicted  to  a  cruel  and  nerve-breaking  extent.    Mr. , 

to  his  credit,  discouraged  the  cane. 

The  Latin  master  used  to  wear  shoes  with  very  wide,  sharp 
toes  to  them,  and  any  mistake  in  answering  a  question  drew 
a  kick  in  the  shin,  launched  with  quite  extraordinary  prompti- 
tude and  accuracy.  The  custom  was  for  the  class  to  stand 
round  the  master's  desk,  close  up.  The  head  master  had  very 
long  arms,  and  instead  of  a  kick  he  administered  a  box  on  the 
ear.  As  between  the  two,  the  kick  was  more  painful,  but  the 
blow  drew  the  attention  of  the  whole  school,  and  I  preferred 
the  kick. 

There  was  one  big  schoolroom.  The  Sixth  Form  had  a 
room  of  its  own;  all  the  rest  of  us  were  taught  in  groups  in 
that  big  room,  and  so,  if  we  did  not  stand  close  to  the  teacher's 
desk,  it  was  impossible  for  scholar  or  master  to  hear  what  was 
said  in  class. 

The  English  teacher,  the  man  who  should  have  introduced 
us  to  the  greatest  literature  in  the  world,  was  utterly  incom- 
petent. He  was  an  Englishman,  a  very  high  churchman — 
rare  in  those  days — and,  I  am  sorry  to  say,  a  blackguard.    He 

36 


SCHOOLDAYS  37 

used  to  have  day  boys  to  meet  him  outside  the  school  and  go 
for  country  walks  with  him  alone.  What  he  did  or  tried  to  do 
on  such  occasions  I  cannot  print.  Boys  who  flouted  him  had 
not  a  good  time  in  his  class.  There  was  a  Frenchman,  a  lonely 
man,  very  much  of  a  gentleman,  who  refused  to  punish  us  in 
any  way.  He  taught  foreign  languages.  We  did  not  appre- 
ciate him,  I  fear,  and  his  task  was  a  hopeless  one.  I  don't 
think  he  knew  a  single  soul  in  the  dull  little  town,  and  why  a 
man  of  his  tastes  and  breeding  was  reduced  to  such  a  method 
of  making  a  pittance  I  never  knew. 

Irish  schools  were  bad  in  the  '6o's.  The  custom  of  filthy 
talking  among  both  boarders  and  day  scholars  was  almost 
universal.  Some  boys  made  it  a  cult.  Bullying  of  the  little 
by  the  big  was  a  matter  of  course  and  was  quite  brutal  at  times. 
The  hours  were  long,  seven  to  eight-thirty  in  the  morning, 
ten  to  one,  and  two-thirty  to  four  in  the  afternoon;  no  school  on 
Saturdays  after  one  o'clock. 

To  this  school  I  went  when  I  was  twelve.  I  was  then  very 
much  overgrown  for  my  age,  very  tall  and  very  thin  and  in- 
clined to  be  a  coward;  self-conscious  and  shy  when  away  from 
home.  I  had  an  unusually  poor  memory;  all  lessons  were 
learned  by  heart,  and  this  I  found  hard.  I  went  to  school 
determined  to  do  my  very  best,  but  this  first  plunge  into  its 
waters,  cold,  strange,  and  filthy,  was  more  than  I  had  bargained 
for.  I  was  just  the  sort  of  boy,  though  I  did  not  know  it,  likely 
to  fail  with  both  master  and  scholar — and  fail  I  certainly  did. 
I  had  no  friend  or  confidant  in  the  school,  no  older  boy  to  steer 
me.  Jack  Barton  had  been  sent  to  Repton,  and  the  older 
boarders  found  a  serious  grievance  against  me  in  my  father's 
long  sermons  on  Sunday,  to  which  they  were  obliged  to  listen. 
My  first  days  in  that  school  were  as  miserable  as  any  boy's 
well  could  be. 

All  new  boys  had  to  be  "pinched" — it  was  the  rule;  and 
pinching  meant  that  a  big  boy  held  you  fast  while  another  big 
boy  took  hold  of  small  pieces  of  flesh,  beginning  at  your  knees 
and  religiously  going  up  to  your  shoulders  and  down  your 
arms — took  them  between  the  bent  knuckle  of  the  thumb  and 
the  first  finger  tip,  as  in  a  pincers,  and  with  a  sharp  twist  almost 
drew  blood.     As  a  result  your  body  was  marked  for  weeks. 

Then  you  were  forced  to  fight  any  boy  in  your  class  who 


38  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

wanted  to  fight  you.  A  ring  was  formed — there  was  no  escape. 
This  I  refused  to  do,  and  though  heavily  struck  in  the  face 
several  times,  would  not  strike  back.  Naturally  I  was  voted  a 
coward.  My  mother  told  me  it  was  wrong  to  fight;  that  was 
the  reason  I  gave  myself  for  not  fighting,  but  really  I  had  no 
stomach  for  it.  I  half  believed  myself  a  coward.  However,  I 
hid  my  bruises  and  pains  as  well  as  I  could  and  said  nothing 
about  them  at  home. 

Seeing  that  I  made  no  resistance  and  told  no  tales,  two  of 
the  big  boarders,  the  worst  of  the  lot,  when  early  school  was 
over  one  morning,  locked  me  in,  in  the  school  porch,  refusing  to 
let  me  go  home  to  breakfast,  and  when  their  breakfast  was 
over  poured  a  bucket  of  cold  water  and  swill  over  my  head 
and  then  let  me  go.  I  came  home  shivering — it  was  in  winter 
— and  my  mother  at  once  found  out  the  truth  and  drew  my 
story  from  me.  I  did  not  go  back  to  school  that  day,  but 
Father  and  Mother  together  made  a  formal  call  on  the  head 
master,  and  I  never  was  bullied  again.  The  incident  didn't 
add  to  my  popularity. 

Gradually  things  improved.  The  Latin  master  found  that  I 
really  was  trying  to  learn  my  tasks,  but  that  to  get  forty  lines 
of  Virgil  by  heart  was  something  I  could  not  do.  He  cut  me 
down  to  twenty  lines,  and  I  did  better. 

So  far  as  school  was  concerned  at  this  time,  life  was  rather 
gray.  I  never  made  a  real  friend  among  masters  or  boys. 
But  of  one  day  at  that  time  I  must  speak — a  red-letter  day,  an 
important  day  in  my  life,  a  day  with  my  mother: 

I  speak  of  one  from  many  singled  out, 
One  of  those  blissful  days  that  cannot  die. 

It  was  springtime,  and  I  had  had  a  spell  of  weakness  and  bad 
growing  pains  at  night.  I  hated  my  lessons;  I  hated  the  dirty 
talk  of  the  boys.  Life  was  a  burden  and  I  was  sick  of  it  all. 
When  I  came  back  from  early  school  to  breakfast  that  morning, 
Mother  looked  at  me  and  said:  "Willie,  you  shall  not  go  back 
to  school  to-day.  You  and  I  will  go  for  a  walk."  Words  can- 
not express  what  I  felt,  what  amazement,  what  delight,  what 
delicious  peace  and  rest  and  joy.  As  soon  as  prayers  were  over 
she  took  me  out  with  her.  "Let  us  go  to  the  Demesne,"  she 
said.    Lord  Roden's  demesne  was  a  semi-public  park.     It  shoul- 


SCHOOLDAYS  39 

dered  itself  up  against  the  town,  and  in  it  was  a  modest  red-brick 
lodge,  the  very  occasional  residence  of  the  Earl  whose  "chap- 
lain" my  father  was.  The  Demesne  meant  much  to  well- 
behaved  Dundalk  boys;  all  such  had  the  run  of  it.  There  were 
acres  of  wild  woodland;  thickets  that  had  once  been  orderly 
plantations  and  had  fallen  into  disorder;  walks  once  neatly  kept 
were  now  half  hidden  by  the  brushwood.  There  was  a  great 
fruit  garden,  the  gates  always  carefully  locked,  surrounded 
by  a  high  brick  wall  on  the  inside  of  which  wonderful  pear 
and  green  gage  plum  trees  were  trained.  A  landscape  archi- 
tect of  the  time  of  George  IV  whose  equerry  the  old  Earl  had 
been  had  planned  a  quite  extensive  system  of  artificial  waters 
spanned  in  one  place  by  a  handsome  stone  bridge,  and  by  the 
waters  grew  a  tree  of  wonder — a  real  cedar  of  Lebanon.  Reeds 
and  water  plants  had  choked  the  canals,  and  among  them  water 
hens  and  a  very  occasional  wild  duck  nested.  Then  there  were 
rabbits  and  wood  pigeons.  I  once  saw  a  real  cock  pheasant 
and  more  than  once  flushed  a  woodcock.  Oh,  the  Demesne 
was  a  land  of  mystery  and  wonder,  a  place  I  dearly  loved,  and 
to  it,  that  May  morning,  Mother  and  I  went. 

On  a  little  knoll,  under  a  beech  tree,  she  sat  down  at  last, 
and  I  at  her  feet.  Of  what  she  said  to  me  that  morning  I 
remember  nothing;  but  she  drew  me  to  her  as  never  before.  I 
felt  she  understood  me.  I  felt  I  was  not  quite  a  failure.  I  can 
see  now  the  first  delicate,  feathery  green  of  the  beech  buds,  as 
they  came  slowly  out  of  their  dark  orange-brown  sticky  casings. 
I  can  see  the  blue  flowers  of  the  wild  hyacinth  and  the  pale 
yellow  of  the  primroses  that  grew  with  them  on  that  little 
knoll;  and  I  never  see  a  beech  tree  bursting  into  leaf  in  the 
springtime  without  thinking  of  that  wonderful  holiday  morn- 
ing spent  with  Mother  more  than  fifty-five  years  ago. 

She  had  so  many  things  to  do;  she  was  no  longer  strong;  she 
had  eight  small  children  and  one  maid  of  all  work,  yet  she 
gave  up  the  whole  morning  to  me.  If  she  knows  anything  now, 
she  knows  that  I  can  never,  never  thank  her  for  what  she  did 
that  day;  she  put  new  hope  and  faith  and  confidence  into  her 
boy  that  morning. 

We  never  had  been  so  near  each  other,  Mother  and  I,  and  yet 
— ah,  the  tragedy  of  things! — had  we  known  it,  the  very  new 
life  she  gave  me  then,  the  first  beginnings  of  a  boy's  self-con- 


4o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

fidence,  were  to  take  me  very  far  away  from  much  she  held 
most  necessary  and  most  dear. 

She  bade  me  look  forward  and  upward,  and  because  she 
helped  me  as  none  other  could  to  do  both,  she  all  unconsciously 
prepared  me  to  break  from  a  past  that  was  all  in  all  to  her 
and  struggle  toward  a  future  of  which  she  always  disapproved. 

Oh,  the  tragedy  of  ties  severed  by  forces  quite  beyond  our 
power  to  measure  or  control! 

As  later  years  passed,  I  was  much  more  away  from  home 
than  were  any  of  my  brothers  and  sisters,  and  I  seemed  to  get 
out  of  touch  with  my  mother.  She  understood  the  others 
better  than  she  did  me.  She  wrote  to  me  once  that  I  was  in- 
clined heedlessly  to  change  my  opinions.  I  have  no  doubt 
she  was  right.  When  I  got  to  the  point  of  being  unable  to 
accept  and  believe  some  of  the  fixed  doctrines  of  Evangelicism, 
she  let  me  see  that  she  was  disappointed  in  me,  that  she  re- 
sented my  departing  from  my  childhood's  faith,  and  put  it  down 
to  a  boyish  instability.  She  thought  I  was  superficial,  and  I 
was;  that  I  would  not  last.  When  I  was  twenty-six  years  old, 
after  meditation  and  such  honest  self-searching  as  I  was  capable 
of,  I  made  up  my  mind  to  leave  England,  at  least  for  a  time. 
It  was  a  cruel  wrench,  but  by  far  the  bitterest  part  of  it  was  my 
mother's  disapproval.  She  could  see  neither  sense  nor  reason 
in  the  step.  She  did  not  understand;  I  could  not  explain  with- 
out causing  her  more  cruel  pain,  keener  disappointment  in  me. 
The  only  thing  that  held  me  to  my  decision  was  the  conviction 
that  I  was  trying  to  do  the  right  thing  as  I  saw  it. 

I  remember  well  when  I  knelt  by  her  chair  and  bade  her 
good-bye,  I  thanked  and  blessed  her  for  that  May  morning  so 
many  years  behind  us,  which  she  gave  to  her  spring-sick  boy  in 
the  old  Demesne.  Two  years,  eventful  for  me,  passed  before 
I  saw  my  mother  again.  I  had  faced  a  new  world,  without 
money  or  friends  or  influence,  and  in  a  modest  way  had  made 
good.  I  think  I  had  drunk  at  least  as  much  of  the  heady  wine 
of  success  as  was  good  for  me,  and  when  I  came  back  to  Mother's 
bedside,  I  should  have  stayed  there  much  longer  than  I  did.  I 
have  blamed  myself  bitterly  since  for  not  putting  all  other 
things  aside  and  giving  myself  up  to  her  for  a  time,  as  Caroline 
(my  second  sister,  a  very  noble  woman)  did.     But  it  was  holi- 


SCHOOLDAYS  41 

day  time;  I  was  soon  to  be  married;  I  was  drinking  great 
draughts  at  new  fountains;  and  with  Mother,  life  was  even  less 
articulate  than  it  had  been.  She  had  never  found  it  easy  to 
express  her  inner  self.  So,  though  I  constantly  sat  by  her 
bedside,  our  truest  selves  did  not  touch.  How  hard  it  is  for 
youth  and  vigour  to  realize  the  withdrawal,  the  enforced  lone- 
liness, that  pain  and  bodily  decay  so  inevitably  bring  to  those 
who  approach  death!  I  can  understand  at  seventy  what  I 
could  not  understand  at  twenty-eight. 

There  is  a  popular  and  quite  untenable  proposition,  gener- 
ally maintained  by  people  in  fine  health,  that  suffering  is  a  good 
thing  in  itself  and  makes  for  holiness.  I  saw  the  senseless 
cruelty  of  nature  gradually  beating  to  earth  a  beautiful  and 
buoyant  spirit — my  mother. 

No  one  ever  bore  agony  more  heroically  than  did  she.  She 
believed  that  God  sent  her  suffering,  and  her  faith  never 
wavered,  as  month  by  month,  year  by  year,  pain  crushed  her 
lower  and  lower.  Her  frail  body  was  spent,  her  mind  was 
fading  out,  but  her  purpose  held.  Since  God  sent  her  agony, 
it  was  her  part  to  endure;  and  so,  resolute  to  her  last  breath, 
no  drug  that  science  knows  for  alleviating  suffering  should 
pass  her  lips. 

And  so,  a  soul  triumphant,  contemptuous  of  death  and  pain, 
avid  of  life,  my  mother  passed.  What  heroism  could  be  greater 
than  hers?  Well  I  know  I  was  not  worthy  of  her,  but  it  was  a 
great  thing  to  have  been  her  eldest  son. 

A    POOR    BOARDING    SCHOOL 

If  I  had  poor  luck  in  my  first  school,  in  my  second,  a  private 
boarding  school  in  Shropshire,  I  had  no  better. 

That  school  and  its  master  shall  be  nameless.  It  was  very 
popular  for  a  time  with  the  extreme  Evangelicals,  as  its  declared 
purpose  was  to  promote  and  guide  the  religious  life  of  the 
scholars. 

One  year's  experience  of  it  taught  me  that  its  religion  was  a 
sham;  as  non-existent  as  its  scholarship.  We  were  preached 
at  and  prayed  at,  and  spied  on,  but  taught  absolutely  nothing. 
But  it  had  one  or  two  good  points.  If  you  gave  signs  of  spirit- 
ual development,  you  were  taken  four  times  a  year  on  a  whole 
holiday  to  some  place  of  interest  remarkable  for  its  beauty  or 


42  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

for  its  historic  associations,  some  ancient  castle  or  battlefield. 
Then  it  was  near  the  "Wrekin,"  that  wooded  hill  standing  out 
of  the  Shropshire  plain — a  quite  lovely  roaming  place  not  yet 
spoiled  by  holiday  makers,  where  woodland  wonders  not  found 
in  Irish  countryside  could  be  had; where  nightingales  sometimes 
sang  and  real  snakes  were  discoverable.  And  third,  they  fed 
us  well.  I  have  never  tasted  such  apple  dumplings  before  or 
since. 

But,  oh!  how  homesick  that  place  made  me!  So  let  me  go 
back  again  to  my  home,  my  real  school,  where  unconsciously 
I  was  being  prepared  for  life's  battle;  where  there  was  no  sham 
religion,  but  fine  purpose  and  honest  faith  and  love  always. 

Here  I  must  tell  another  story  of  my  mother,  the  story  of  a 
lesson  she  gave  me  that  no  school  however  good  could  have 
given.  I  did  not  want  to  go  to  a  boarding  school  at  all,  and  of 
course  reasons  were  not  given  me — at  least  not  detailed  reas- 
ons, for  it  was  not  the  custom  to  argue  with  us  children.  But 
the  day  before  the  little  Dundalk  steamer  left,  that  sailed  twice 
a  week  to  Liverpool,  my  mother  took  me  into  her  store  room. 
In  a  corner  of  that  room  stood  a  large  mahogany  box  lined,  I 
remember,  with  green  baize.  That  box  and  its  contents  were 
precious  in  her  eyes,  and  well  they  might  be,  for  in  it  was  part  of 
a  fine  silver  service,  presented  long  ago  by  a  very  great  man 
to  her  great-grandfather  the  Bishop,  who  had  been  his  school- 
mate at  Eton. 

The  great  man  was  Charles  James  Fox.  Father  and  Mother 
had  been  through  hard  times  together,  but  the  sale  of  that 
precious  heirloom  had  never  been  thought  of.  To  send  me  to 
school  strained  their  narrow  income,  and  so  she  sold  her  silver, 
and  I  remember  in  that  out-of-the-way  market,  that  precious 
Georgian  coffee  and  tea  service  fetched  just  five  shillings  the 
ounce.  It  was  broken  up  for  old  silver;  that  was  what  old 
silver  fetched  in  Dundalk. 

"Willie,"  she  said,  "I  am  selling  this  to  send  you  to  school. 
Won't  you  do  your  best  there?"  No  poor  schooling  could 
make  me  forget  that  lesson  or  fail  to  keep  the  promise  she 
asked  me  to  make  her,  that  I  would  learn  my  two  verses  of 
Scripture  each  morning  when  I  was  away. 

When  I  was  quite  little,  Mother  taught  me  a  verse  of  the 
Bible  every  morning.     When  I  could  read,  I  learned  two  for 


SCHOOLDAYS  43 

her  on  week  days  and  six  on  Sundays.  In  this  way  she  helped 
me  to  form  a  habit  that  proved  of  greatest  possible  value.  She 
saw  that  my  memory  was  unusually  poor,  and  she  took  an 
excellent  way  to  develop  the  little  there  was  of  it. 

People  have  said  to  me,  when  in  some  sermon  or  address 
I  have  aptly  quoted  verses  from  the  Bible,  or  from  some  poet, 
"What  a  memory  you  have!"  It  was  not  memory;  they  were 
recognizing  the  results  of  habit.  I  have  always  had  something 
worth  remembering  before  me,  either  in  book  or  manuscript,  as 
I  dressed  in  the  morning.  It  takes  me  days  to  commit  a  few 
lines,  but  I  choose  the  best,  and  their  digestion  and  assimilation 
meant  a  full  man. 

A  man  can  make  a  better  day's  march  if  he  has  something 

solid  inside  him  in  the  morning.     I  commend  the  habit;  it  is 

disciplinary,  and  apart  from  the  pleasure  and  strength  it  gives 

•you,  it  very  greatly  helps  to  feed  and  brighten  the  lives  of  others. 

Homes  made  good  the  defects  of  schools  when  I  was  a  boy, 
or  at  least  homes  like  mine  did.  Schools  are  now  expected  to 
make  good  the  defects  of  homes,  and  they  cannot  do  it.  It 
is  asking  too  much  of  the  best  of  them.  The  trouble  with 
modern  child  culture  is  too  often  that  parents  are  not  sufficiently 
absorbed  in  the  upbringing  of  their  children  from  earliest  in- 
fancy. They  do  not  realize  that  no  social,  no  financial  success, 
can  in  the  long  last  do  for  their  children  what  it  is  given  them 
to  do.  Their  children  are  not  the  supreme  thing  in  life;  other 
interests  shoulder  them  aside;  and  when  parental  ignorance, 
sluggishness,  or  inattention  beget  their  natural  result,  the 
young  things  are  packed  off  to  some  school,  where  it  is  expected 
that  early  faults  and  wrong  tendencies,  which  should  never 
have  been  permitted  to  harden  into  habits,  shall,  by  some 
miraculous  influence  of  hired  experts  suddenly  applied,  be 
quite  done  away  with,  and  so  the  past  be  remedied  and  the 
future  assured. 


CHAPTER  V 

An  Irish  Boy  in  London 

When  the  Christmas  holidays  were  over  in  1865,  when  I 
bade  my  parents  good-bye  on  the  pier,  and  looked  across  the 
meadows  at  the  old  vicarage,  as  the  little  channel  steamer  made 
its  careful  way  to  the  open  sea,  I  little  realized  that  I  had  bidden 
a  last  farewell  to  that  dear  home.  The  big  garden  where  I  had 
worked  for  my  mother,  my  pony,  the  long  tramps  by  the  river- 
side or  across  the  bogs  to  the  mountain  slopes,  rambles  at  sun- 
rise with  my  gun  in  the  Demesne,  all  henceforth  to  be  memories 
only;  yet  so  it  was  decreed. 

The  wise,  self-sacrificing  love  of  my  parents  and  happy  cir- 
cumstance combined  to  create  for  me  during  the  most  formative 
years  of  boyhood  that  rare  and  beautiful  thing,  an  ideal  home. 
I  do  not  think  that  we  children  were  in  any  special  degree  con- 
genial companions  to  one  another.  We  were  singularly  unlike, 
and  as  years  passed  we  took  our  own  courses  in  life  and  drifted 
widely  apart.  But  I  see  now,  as  I  look  back  on  those  bright 
happy  years,  that  the  secret  of  real  success  had  been  under- 
stood by  my  parents,  and  had,  by  loving  care  and  leadership, 
and  with  a  rare  consistence,  been  impressed  on  us  all — namely, 
a  lasting  happiness,  happiness  that  is  worth  while,  depends  on 
living  for  others.  We  had  unconsciously  but  really  been  taught 
to  live  for  one  another,  and  though  we  were  poor,  and  had  few 
or  none  of  the  costly  distractions  that  are  to-day  supposed  to  be 
necessary  to  the  making  of  a  happy  home,  we  certainly  had  in 
that  old  vicarage  a  rare  good  time.  Our  next  home  was  to  be 
in  a  city  square. 

I  remember  with  what  consternation  I  received  the  news 
at  school.  Father  had  been  called  to  a  London  church,  and  to 
London  we  were  all  going.  I  knew  the  change  would  be  great, 
but  it  was  far  greater  than  I  dreamed.     I  had,  however,  one 

44 


AN  IRISH  BOY  IN  LONDON  45 

immense  consolation — if  it  was  hard  to  leave  Dundalk,  it  was 
delightful  to  bid  good-bye  to  Doctor  C 's. 

Our  first  abode  was  48  Thurlow  Square,  S.  W.  There  were 
Squares  and  Crescents  and  Terraces  and  Gardens  by  the  score, 
as  the  great  city  sprawled  out  to  the  southwest,  the  houses  in 
all  of  them  built  of  colourless  yellow  brick,  the  front  door  of  each 
one  of  them  standing  under  the  shadow  of  two  stucco  pillars 
that  supported  a  small  balcony  overhead,  where  families  that 
could  afford  the  luxury  stretched  an  awning,  and  kept  boxes  of 
sickly  geraniums. 

Eight  country-bred  children  ranging  from  fifteen  to  three 
years  old  packed  into  a  narrow  city  home,  old  ties  wrenched 
away,  no  new  ones  formed  as  yet,  our  adored  mother  sickening 
in  the  city  air  and  failing  before  our  eyes — it  was  a  gloomy 
prospect  that  lay  before  us  children  that  first  Easter,  or  so  we 
voted  it.  I  looked  at  my  rod  and  hooks  and  flies,  and  thought 
of  the  streams  I  knew  so  well,  where  by  now  in  the  spring 
weather  the  trout  would  rise  if  you  gave  them  the  right  fly. 
I  hated  the  noisy  streets,  and  our  square  garden  with  its  half- 
alive  shrubbery,  to  touch  a  twig  of  which  blackened  your  hand 
with  clinging  soot. 

The  first  Sunday  in  Father's  church,  St.  John's,  Halkin 
Street,  Belgrave  Square,  was  an  ordeal.  All  of  us  sat  in  one  long 
pew  under  the  low  heavy  gallery  that  circled  the  dismal  build- 
ing. Mother  sat  next  the  door.  The  church  was  not  yet 
quite  full,  but  was  filling  rapidly  with  a  congregation  as  in- 
fluential and  as  fashionable  as  any  in  the  town,  though  Father 
had  been  preaching  for  only  two  or  three  months.  In  our 
rough  Irish  clothes  we  must  have  contrasted  sharply,  that 
first  Sunday,  with  the  very  smart  people  all  round  us.  But  if 
we  did,  that  did  not  trouble  us  in  those  days. 

We  had  loved  the  old  church  across  the  water,  with  all  its 
queer  nooks  and  corners,  every  one  of  them  holding  a  friend, 
and  we  heartily  disliked  the  new.  Indeed  it  had  nothing  to 
recommend  it  but  the  man  who  filled  its  pulpit.  Plain  and 
ugly  it  was,  the  one  attempt  at  outside  decoration  about  it 
being  four  heavy  stucco  pillars  standing  in  front,  and  sup- 
porting nothing  to  speak  of,  the  plaster  on  them  flaked  and 
threatening  to  fall.  On  the  inside,  nothing  to  relieve  the  dull, 
monotonous  ugliness  of  windows  and  walls.     The  shallow  chan- 


46  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

eel  backed  up  against  the  dead  wall  of  the  Duke  of  "Some- 
where's"  house,  so  a  chancel  window  was  impossible.  On 
Holy  Communion  Sunday  mornings  I  used  to  look  for  the 
peeping  neck  of  the  extra  bottle  of  wine  showing  underneath 
the  fringe  of  the  blue  cloth  covering  of  the  Holy  Table  that  did 
not  quite  reach  the  floor.  A  deep  gallery  extended  all  round, 
seating  quite  two  hundred  and  fifty  people;  the  pews  on  the 
floor  seated  some  eight  hundred  and  fifty  more. 

Many  such  chapels  had  been  built  in  London  during  the 
Evangelical  revival  of  the  past  seventy-five  years.  They 
were  unnecessarily  ugly,  and  of  them  all  I  think  St.  John's, 
Halkin  Street,  standing  in  the  middle  of  the  most  fashionable 
part  of  London,  was  the  ugliest.  The  music  was  execrable,  the 
service  slovenly,  but  the  preacher  won  in  good  part  the  ear  of 
London  and  held  it  for  a  time.  I  saw  the  Prince  of  Wales 
there  more  than  once,  and  he  asked  that  Father  should  be  in- 
formally presented  to  him.  Gladstone  came  sometimes,  in 
spite  of  his  avowed  high-churchmanship.  The  Lord  Chan- 
cellor, Cairns,  was  one  of  the  first  to  rent  a  pew.  Statesmen, 
soldiers,  bankers,  and  many  members  of  Parliament,  as  well 
as  some  of  the  first  families  in  England  that  had  been  in- 
fluenced by  the  Evangelical  revival,  attended  regularly.  The 
chapel  was  soon  full,  every  seat  rented;  it  was  enough  to  turn 
any  man's  head,  but  Father  was  not  in  the  very  least  changed 
by  it.  His  sermons  praised,  his  advice  sought,  his  friendship 
courted  by  many  of  the  great  of  the  land,  he  still  quietly  went 
about  his  work  with  the  same  earnest  regularity  he  had  used 
in  the  poor  Irish  parish.  In  the  mornings  he  shut  himself  in 
his  study;  in  the  afternoons  he  went  from  house  to  house  visiting 
the  sick  and  the  well,  several  hours  each  day.  Generally  in  the 
evening  he  dined  out,  and  always  went  alone;  for  Mother's 
health,  and  her  distaste,  too,  for  new  surroundings  and  new  peo- 
ple, resulted  in  her  never  accompanying  him.  At  first  the 
callers  at  48  Thurlow  Square  were  innumerable,  but  since 
there  could  be  none  other  than  a  return  of  cards  by  way  of  the 
mail,  this  soon  ceased.  So  circumstances  that  none  of  us  could 
control  changed  life  for  us  all  completely.  Neither  Father  nor 
Mother  could  act  differently.  But  the  city  had  laid  its  com- 
pelling hands  on  us,  and  home,  as  we  had  known  it  till  my 
sixteenth  year,  was  but  a  memory. 


AN  IRISH  BOY  IN  LONDON  47 

The  old  book  says:  "Sorrow  may  endure  for  a  night,  but  joy 
cometh  in  the  morning."  So  it  fell  out  that  first  Eastertide  I 
am  writing  of.  The  very  day  after  our  dolorous  introduction 
to  St.  John's  we  had  a  surprise.  Two  dear  discerning  women, 
whose  souls  Father's  sermons  had  comforted,  marked  that 
first  day  in  church,  the  aspect  of  that  packed  pew  of  young, 
unaccustomed  things,  and  48  Thurlow  Square  had  two  visitors 
who  would  not  be  denied.  The  Misses  Onslow  were  aunts  of 
the  Earl  of  that  name,  very  considerable  ladies  indeed;  they 
lived  in  a  commodious  house  at  Alresford,  Hampshire. 

What  were  we  children  going  to  do  during  the  Easter  holi- 
days; were  we  going  to  the  country? 

Alas,  no  such  luck. 

Then  we  should  go  there  with  them,  and  go  we  did,  no  less 
than  six  of  us. 

So  came  my  first  taste  of  London's  hospitality,  and  thought- 
ful and  generous  and  warm-hearted  it  surely  was  then  and  al- 
ways after  to  the  family  of  the  loved  pastor. 

They  were  old  maids,  but  there  was  nothing  old  maidish 
about  them.  They  were  full  of  consideration  for  others,  with 
a  certain  high-bred  assurance  that  made  the  taking  of  any 
liberty  with  them  impossible;  charitable,  refined,  cultivated; 
in  the  best  sense  women  of  the  world,  full  of  genuine  kindness 
and  worldly  wisdom,  as  well  as  Evangelical  piety. 

I  might  say  that  till  then  I  had  only  seen  England  through 

the  fence  of  Doctor  C 's  school.     My  brothers  and  sisters 

had  never  crossed  the  water,  so  to  all  of  us  Upton  was  a  revela- 
tion. Hampshire  is  one  of  the  loveliest  counties  in  England; 
at  springtime  it  looks  its  best,  and  it  gave  us  a  great  reception, 
that  Easter  of  1865.  The  old  beech  trees  on  the  lawn  were 
bursting  into  bud,  primroses  and  wild  hyacinths  were  aplenty, 
and  there  was  a  river,  such  a  river  as  I  had  never  dreamed  of — 
clearer  by  far  than  were  the  Irish  bog-coloured  streams — that 
made  its  leisurely  way  through  carefully  tended  watercress 
beds  to  the  Itchen  hard  by. 

Here  let  me  tell  a  fishing  story  that  has  an  interest  for  trout 
fishers.  I  noticed  lately,  in  Viscount  Grey's  delightful  book  on 
fly-fishing  in  the  Itchen  that  he  says  he  was  unable  to  get  any 
fish  even  to  rise  to  the  wet  fly  on  that  river  when  he  was  a  boy  at 
Winchester  School,  in  1 877.    He  tells  the  history  of  his  repeated 


48  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

failure  with  the  wet,  and  growing  success  with  the  dry,  fly: 
one  trout  in  1878,  thirteen  in  1879,  an<^  m  I88o,  seventy-six. 

Now  when  I  fished  the  Onslow  water  on  the  Itchen  in  1 865  and 
1866,  I  certainly  had  only  a  boy's  skill,  and  did  not  probably 
get  out  any  better  line  than  did  Lord  Grey  at  the  same  age. 
Yet,  fishing  behind  Guilford  Onslow,  I  always  got  some  trout, 
and  he,  an  excellent  fisherman,  filled  his  basket,  using  nothing 
but  the  wet  fly.  And  afterward,  fishing  by  myself,  I  several 
times  filled  a  twelve-pound  basket  without  any  special  diffi- 
culty. Now  the  interesting  point  about  my  fishing  yarn  is, 
what  changed  the  customs  of  the  Itchen  trout  between  1865 
and  1 877  ?  That  they  cannot  now  be  induced  to  take  the  wet 
fly  is,  I  think,  a  fact  beyond  dispute. 

Upton  was  comfort,  plenty,  and  hospitality  itself,  but  one 
thing  Upton  had  very  much  in  common  with  our  own  Irish 
home.  Upton  believed  in  and  practised  order.  Its  rule  was 
generous,  but  by  rule  it  ran.  And  so,  to  keep  us  out  of  trouble, 
those  dear,  wise  ladies  provided  an  ideal  guard  and  guide,  a 
retired  sporting-farmer  sort  of  man,  who  lived  hard  by  their 
gate,  and  worshipped  the  ground  they  walked  on,  who  had 
taught  them  when  they  were  girls  how  to  handle  their  first 
ponies,  and  their  nephew,  the  Earl,  how  to  shoot.  Just  the 
sort  of  man  boys  love  was  old  man  Jarvis.  What  walks  and 
confabs  I  had  with  him !  And  what  lore  of  bird  and  beast  and 
fish  was  his!  He  loved  to  hand  on  to  an  appreciative  boy  all 
he  knew.  There  was  only  one  thing  the  Misses  Onslow  could 
not  make  him  do;  that  was,  go  to  church.  He  was  a  dear  old 
heathen.  But  his  little  world  was  certainly  the  better  for  his 
having  lived  in  it. 

In  later  days  many  houses,  some  of  them  much  greater  than 
Upton,  were  hospitably  opened  to  me,  but  none  of  them  quite 
took  its  place.  I  went  there  to  skate  and  shoot  at  Christmas, 
and  to  catch  trout  in  its  matchless  chalk  streams  in  the  spring. 
Till  Mother  died,  and  we  all  had  gone  our  several  ways  in  the 
world,  some  of  us  went  each  year  to  Upton.  When  I  came 
back  from  the  United  States,  I  went  to  visit  the  dear  old  place, 
but  it  held  other  mistresses  and  old  Jarvis  was  dead. 

The  school  problem  came  up  again  when  Easter  holidays 
were  over.  I  succeeded  in  convincing  my  mother  that  Doctor 
C 's,  in  spite  of  its  religious  advantages,  was  a  waste  of 


AN  IRISH  BOY  IN  LONDON  49 

Father's  money  and  my  time.  I  begged  to  be  allowed  to  re- 
main at  home,  and  won  out.  My  brothers  and  I  went  to  a 
good  grammar  school  in  old  Kensington  Square. 

It  seemed,  however,  as  though  fate  was  against  my  gaining 
even  that  moderately  good  introduction  to  an  education  ac- 
corded to  boys  of  my  age.  In  the  spring  of  the  next  year,  I 
caught  a  bad  cold  and  developed  a  persistent  cough  which, 
though  it  did  not  trouble  me  much,  alarmed  my  mother.  I 
was  taken  away  from  Kensington  and  sent  for  a  long  visit  to 
my  godfather's  house  on  Lough  Sheelan  in  Ireland. 

The  Hon.  Somerset  Maxwell,  afterward  Lord  Farnham,  was 
a  devoted  friend  of  my  father's,  and  I  can  never  be  too  grate- 
ful for  his  goodness  to  me.  He  and  Mrs.  Maxwell  took  as  good 
care  of  me  as  if  I  had  been  their  own,  and  though  there  were  no 
other  boys  about,  I  had  a  great  time  swimming  and  fishing  in 
the  lake.  Never  was  a  lad  more  fortunate  in  his  friends  or  in 
his  holidays  than  I  have  been. 

Arley,  modestly  called  a  cottage,  was  really  a  most  com- 
fortable country  home.  It  stood  surrounded  by  mossy  lawns 
(and  nowhere  are  there  mossy  lawns  like  those  of  Ireland)  and 
quite  immense  rhododendron  bushes,  on  the  edge  of  the  wide, 
deep,  rocky,  islanded  Lough  Sheelan.  Opposite  the  house, 
perhaps  more  than  a  mile  away,  all  that  was  left  of  some  petty 
chieftain's  stronghold,  wrecked  by  the  English  in  the  days  of 
Tyrone's  Elizabethan  rebellion,  stood  up  boldly  from  the 
water.  Round  its  base  the  herons  would  stand  fishing,  silent, 
immovable;  and  many  a  time,  in  the  evening  quiet,  did  I  try  to 
stalk  them,  in  vain.  Lough  Sheelan  had  its  brief  season,  for 
there  was  great  fishing  in  the  springtime.  Then  the  May  fly 
was  hatched  out,  and  rose  to  the  surface,  and  fishers  from 
many  parts  came,  putting  up  at  such  rough  quarters  as  could  be 
had  (for  hotels  there  were  none),  to  catch  the  famous  yellow- 
sided  Lough  Sheelan  trout.  Well  I  remember  their  splashing 
rise.  I  suppose  they  are  there  still,  and  that  you  must  wait,  as 
I  did,  hour  by  hour,  watching  the  bait  of  natural  fly  float  out 
bravely  to  leeward  of  the  fishing  boat,  well  contented  if  once  or 
twice  in  the  long  afternoon  the  shy  denizens  of  the  deep  green 
water  flashed  upward  to  the  lure. 

I  spent  several  months  at  Arley,  just  loafing;  doing  no  study- 
ing.   The  truth  was,  though  I  did  not  know  it,  I  had  out- 


50  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

grown  my  strength.  I  was  over  six  feet  high  at  sixteen,  was 
very  thin,  and  my  cough  still  clung  to  me. 

One  memorable  visit  I  made,  before  returning  to  London 
in  the  autumn;  a  visit  that  was  destined  to  influence  my  after 
life.  Castle  Saunderson  was  the  home  of  Edward  Saunderson, 
nephew  of  Lord  Farnham,  and  M.  P.  for  the  county.  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Saunderson  became  my  life-long  friends.  I  owe  them 
more  than  I  can  say  and  I  shall  try  to  say  part  of  it  later. 

At  Castle  Saunderson  I  entered  a  larger  and  more  worldly 
social  circle  than  any  I  had  yet  known.  The  tie  that  bound  all 
the  friends  of  my  earlier  days  together  was  exclusively  a  re- 
ligious tie.  In  those  circles  my  father's  name  was  everything.  I 
was  just  my  father's  son.  Castle  Saunderson  took  me  on  my 
own  showing.  My  host  and  hostess  let  me  see  they  were  in- 
terested in  me  personally.  Naturally,  such  preference  was 
new  and  delightful  and  stimulating.  I  remember  I  began  to 
think  more  of  how  I  looked,  and  to  take  an  interest  in  my 
dressing.  What  charm,  what  wit,  what  delightful  freedom 
from  unnecessary  convention  the  best  Irish  society  had  in  those 
days,  and  how  sure  of  itself  it  was !  It  was  decaying  even  then, 
though  it  knew  it  not.  It  belonged  to  an  order  passing  rapidly 
away;  but  never  was  there  a  society  more  brilliant  or  that  knew 
better  the  rare  secret  of  hospitality.  Its  men  were  gentlemen, 
clean  and  strong  and  unafraid;  its  women  the  most  charming 
and,  I  still  think,  the  most  beautiful  I  have  ever  seen. 

The  Hon.  Helena  Saunderson  was  a  daughter  of  Lord  Ventry. 
She  was  then  a  young  wife  and  a  very  beautiful  woman.  It 
was  dear  of  her  to  take  an  interest  in  me.  She  saw  I  needed 
knocking  into  shape  and  sometimes  she  knocked  pretty  hard. 
She  bossed  and  chaffed  and  criticized  me  unmercifully.  She 
was  the  first  pretty  woman  who  had  ever  noticed  me.  She 
fascinated  me  utterly  and  I  was  her  willing  slave.  Perhaps 
she  did  not  know,  certainly  I  did  not,  what  a  life-long  service 
she  did  me. 

Not  only  at  Upton  and  Arley  was  I  made  welcome  in  those 
days.  Many  of  Father's  friends  and  admirers  gave  a  kindly 
thought  to  his  children,  strange  to  London,  and  showed  them 
kindness  in  hospitable  ways,  I,  being  the  eldest,  getting  more 
than  my  share  of  it.  Mother  had  no  health,  Father  had  no 
time  to  take  us  round,  but  volunteers  there  were  who  knew 


AN  IRISH  BOY  IN  LONDON  51 

London,  and  so  parks,  and  museums,  the  Zoo,  and  the  river,  we 
enjoyed  them  all.  I  had  one  social  adventure  among  "the  great." 
I  will  tell  the  story.  A  dear  old  lady,  the  Duchess  of  Grafton, 
took  somehow  a  fancy  to  me,  and  nothing  would  do  but  I  must 
meet  her  nephew,  a  young  swell  who  had  just  left  Eton.  He  was 
older  than  I,  and  much  too  great  a  man  to  bother  about  me;  he 
took  my  measure  that  first  evening  and  I  never  met  him  again. 

The  dinner  invitation  was  quite  informal  and  was  for  the 
next  evening.  Father,  to  Mother's  consternation,  had  ac- 
cepted for  me,  and  it  never  had  occurred  to  him  that  the  very 
limited  resources  of  my  wardrobe  could  not  possibly  meet  the 
requirements  of  dinner  at  the  Duchess's.  To  put  it  plainly, 
I  had  no  dining-out  suit.  Evening  dress  could  be  hired  if  one 
knew  where  to  go,  which  none  of  us  did.  Then,  even  if  we  had 
known,  I  believe  all  Jewry  might  have  been  searched  in  vain  for 
a  "  ready  made  "  that  would  have  fitted  my  lanky  body.  Father 
had  a  happy  thought — why  not  go  in  his  old  evening  suit,  the 
one  in  fact  that  he  had  been  married  in;  now,  of  course,  he  wore 
clericals  and  did  not  need  it.  Well,  the  old  broadcloth  suit 
was  found  (black  once,  age  had  coloured  it  a  bottle  green),  and 
I  put  it  on.  Mother  was  doubtful,  Father  hopeful,  I  miserable, 
but  what  better  could  any  one  of  us  do  ?  It  was  woefully  short 
in  the  arms  and  the  back,  and  so  tight  in  the  chest  that  I  was 
afraid  to  stand  up. 

The  dinner  was  small,  my  hostess  gracious  and  tactful,  bent 
on  putting  me  at  my  ease;  the  nephew  much  too  great  a  swell 
to  take  any  notice  of  me  other  than  politeness  to  his  aunt  made 
necessary.  I  was  beginning  to  forget  my  clothes  when  my 
very  forgetfulness  brought  about  the  catastrophe.  As  I  leaned 
forward  in  the  middle  of  dinner  to  answer  a  question  of  my 
hostess,  with  a  dull  but  quite  audible  rending  sound  that 
wretched  coat  burst  asunder  from  collar  to  tail.  I  really  won- 
der how  I  did  it.  I  have  muddled  many  a  critical  situation 
since  then,  but  this  first  terrible  time  I  did  the  right  thing  and 
did  it  at  once.  "Duchess,"  I  said,  "it  is  my  father's  wedding 
coat.  I  have  not  an  evening  suit  of  my  own,  and  I  had  to  put 
it  on  or  refuse  your  most  kind  invitation."  All  joined  at  once 
in  a  kindly  general  laugh,  and  everyone  including  myself  forgot 
the  coat,  and  I  had  a  very  pleasant  evening.  Till  her  death, 
the  Dowager  Duchess  of  Grafton  was  one  of  my  warmest  friends. 


CHAPTER  VI 
I  Go  Abroad 

I  had  left  Ireland  in  early  autumn  for  Thurlow  Square,  and 
gone  back  to  the  grammar  school  at  Kensington,  but  indoor  life 
and  study  were  too  much  for  me,  and  the  cough  which  had  never 
quite  left  me  grew  worse.  Father  was  to  pay  a  visit  to  a  Lady 
Bailey,  whose  place  was  on  the  Welsh  border,  and  he  took  me 
there  with  him.  There  again  I  was  fortunate  in  making  new 
friends.  Lady  Bailey's  chaplain,  a  witty  little  Welshman,  who 
had  travelled  much  and  spoke  many  languages  (he,  by  the  way, 
was  the  only  man  I  ever  knew  who  could  talk  in  Latin  as  readily 
as  he  could  in  French),  took  me  under  his  wing.  I  had  a  right 
good  time,  but  the  mountains  were  too  much  for  me,  and  my 
kind  hostess  said  something  to  Father  about  a  famous  Doctor 
Quain  and  the  south  of  France. 

I  did  not  feel  really  ill,  and  wanted  to  go  back  to  Kensington, 
for  I  realized  I  was  falling  behind  boys  of  my  age,  but  my  chest 
began  to  hurt  when  I  walked  fast  or  up  hill,  and  I  spat  blood 
and  had  night  sweats.  In  a  fortnight  Father  and  I  returned 
home,  and  I  was  taken  to  see  the  most  famous  diagnostician 
then  in  London,  Doctor  Quain.  A  crowded  waiting  room,  a 
long  wait,  and  we  were  in  the  great  man's  sanctum.  Father 
presented  a  letter  of  introduction  from  someone  or  other, 
and  I  was  stripped  and  examined  thoroughly.  The  doctor  said 
nothing  at  first,  but  I  did  not  like  his  look.  He  asked  Father 
many  questions  about  his  own  family  and  my  mother's,  and 
then  he  said,  "  Case  of  phthisis"  (I  did  not  know  what  that 
meant),  "one  lung  badly  congested,  the  other  touched." 

"WThat  medicine  do  you  recommend?"  asked  Father. 

"Oh,  medicine  is  no  good;  I  only  give  him  six  months.  Send 
him  to  the  south  of  France.     It  is  his  only  chance." 

I  saw  that  my  father  was  staggered,  but  I  didn't  believe  a 

l5* 


I  GO  ABROAD  S3 

word  of  it,  and  this  summary  doom  of  Doctor  Quain  and  his 
heartless  way  of  putting  it  angered  me.  I  didn't  feel  like  dying 
and  I  did  not  intend  to  die.  On  the  contrary,  I  felt  a  lot  of  life 
within  me  and  was  sure  the  doctor  was  wrong.  What  I  did 
mind  terribly  was  having  to  worry  my  suffering  mother.  Our 
home-coming  that  day  I  cannot  forget. 

Easy  to  say,  "Send  him  to  the  south  of  France,"  but  more 
easily  said  than  done.  Father's  means  were  still  straitened. 
Furnishing  the  London  house  had  taken  all  his  ready  money, 
and  though  the  seats  in  Belgrave  Chapel  were  almost  all 
taken,  money  earned  in  that  way  does  not  reach  a  poor  man's 
pocket  quickly.  He  owed  nothing;  he  had  never  borrowed  a 
penny  in  his  life.  The  bitter  result  of  Irish  borrowing  he  had 
seen  too  much  of  as  a  boy.  But  cash  he  had  not — and  so  how 
was  I  to  go? 

Well,  as  I  shall  tell  more  than  once  again  in  my  story,  the 
extraordinary  thoughtful  kindness  of  my  own  or  my  father's 
friends  saved  me  from  disaster.  Our  late  hostess  wrote,  asking 
about  the  doctor's  verdict,  and  by  return  of  mail  came  a  cheque 
and  a  suggestion  that  her  chaplain  should  be  my  guardian  and 
guide  to  safe  quarters  in  the  south  of  France.  What  better 
chance  could  there  be? — what  kinder  or  easier  plan?  A  safe 
and  comfortable  journey  with  an  experienced  and  sympathetic 
companion;  one  to  whom  the  needs  of  a  sick  boy  and  the  re- 
sources of  a  foreign  land  were  equally  well  known.  If  I  was  not 
rich  I  surely  was  born  lucky.  Further  money  difficulties  were 
solved  just  as  soon  as  my  godfather  and  Father's  friends  learned 
of  the  doctor's  decree. 

If  I  had  had  a  scare,  it  certainly  did  not  last  long;  and  how 
delightful  seemed  the  French  countryside  in  that  beautiful 
autumn  weather!  We  journeyed  by  day,  indeed  by  parts  of 
a  day,  and  took  horses  when  we  could.  We  stopped  at  old- 
fashioned  inns  in  quaint  towns,  where  landlord  and  landlady 
cooked  delicious  meals  for  us  with  their  own  hands,  and  drew 
from  hidden  underground  cellars  bottles  of  wine  my  Welshman 
knowingly  called  for,  with  unmistakably  real  cobwebs  on  them. 
Oh,  it  was  a  journey  to  be  remembered !  Every  day  of  it  I  grew 
stronger,  and  every  night  of  it,  though  the  French  feather  beds 
almost  smothered  me,  I  slept  sounder  and  longer,  and  even 
from  the  feather  beds  rose  refreshed. 


54  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

For  we  know  the  world  is  glorious, 

And  the  Goal  a  golden  thing, 
And  that  God  is  not  censorious 

When  His  children  take  their  fling; 
And  Life  slips  its  tether 

When  the  boys  get  together, 
With  a  stein  on  the  table, 

In  the  fellowship  of  Spring. 

Richard  Hovey's  ringing  lines  were  not  written  for  many  a 
day  after  our  escapade,  but  my  little  Welshman  would  have 
sung  them  heartily  to  their  splendid  tune  had  he  known  them. 

So  we  sauntered  through  France,  and  drove  through  Switzer- 
land, slipped  through  a  corner  of  Austria,  and  so  to  the  wonder- 
ful Italian  lakes  and  Genoa. 

In  Genoa  harbour  I  saw  a  relic  of  real  war.  Part  of  the  sadly 
battered  Italian  fleet  lay  there,  Lissa's  shot  marks  on  them  still 
unrepaired. 

At  Genoa  we  engaged  a  carriage  to  take  us  along  the  road  to 
Mentone.  Only  one  other  road  I  know  of  in  Europe  is  as 
beautiful;  that  is  the  road  from  Salerno  to  Sorrento  (not,  be  it 
remembered,  from  Sorrento  to  Salerno).  We  took  four  or  five 
days  for  the  last  leg  of  our  journey.  That  land  of  flowers  and 
fruit,  of  gray  olive  trees  and  old  forts,  of  overhanging  mountains 
ending  in  red  cliffs  as  they  stepped  down  into  that  blue,  blue 
sea  had  not  then  become  the  crowded  health-holiday  resort 
that  junketing  Europe  knows  to-day.  And  so,  by  it,  without 
crowding  or  hurry,  we  came  at  last  to  our  goal. 

My  friend  went  boarding-house  hunting  the  day  after  our 
arrival,  and  chose  for  me  a  charming  room  in  a  comfortable  and 
quite  commodious  house  standing  back  some  hundred  yards 
from  the  shore,  and  surrounded  on  all  sides  by  orange  and  lemon 
trees.  It  was  in  the  east  bay  of  the  town,  not  far  from  the 
Roches  Rouges,  which  mark  the  frontier  between  France  and 
Italy,  and  directly  back  of  it  rose  the  mass  of  the  Berceau  to  a 
height  of  over  four  thousand  feet. 

I  had  a  room  large  and  sunny,  a  big  tiled  balcony  to  it  all 
my  own;  good  food,  kindly  welcome,  and  constant  courteous 
care  from  my  hostess,  Miss  Newland,  all  for  the  very  modest 
sum  of  eight  francs  a  day.  Next  day  I  wrung  my  little  Welsh- 
man's hand  with  a  very  full  heart,  and  tried  to  thank  him.     We 


I  GO  ABROAD  55 

swore  lasting  friendship,  but  I  never  saw  him  again.  I  think 
that  though  he  made  very  little  profession,  he  was  one  of  the 
best  men  I  ever  knew;  full  of  life,  full  of  consideration  for  others 
in  a  fine,  keen,  discriminating  way.  He  was  not  much  of  a 
preacher,  but  he  was  a  mighty  good  man  to  be  with — he  wore 
well.  True  to  a  friend,  charitable  to  an  enemy,  contemptuous 
of  nothing  but  humbug.  He  was  the  first  cleric  I  had  come  to 
know  who  had  a  dash  of  broad-churchmanship  about  him;  and 
I,  who  had  been  accustomed  to  regard  all  Roman  Catholic 
priests  as  emissaries  of  the  "Man  of  Sin,"  was  astonished  at  the 
evident  enjoyment  he  had  in  talking  to  the  priests  we  met 
in  what  he  declared  was  "  bog  Latin."  Whatever  its  classical 
value  may  have  been,  it  admirably  served  its  purpose,  and  he 
and  the  priests  seemed  to  have  a  good  deal  in  common. 

My  first  loneliness  soon  wore  off.  I  found  a  Frenchman 
who  gave  me  lessons  for  a  couple  of  hours  in  the  morning  three 
times  a  week.  My  fellow-boarders,  Mrs.  Trench — a  relation 
of  the  archbishop's — and  her  two  daughters,  were  charming,  and 
I  was  growing  stronger  every  day,  so  one  could  not  but  be 
happy  in  the  glorious  winter  weather  we  had  that  year  (1867). 

Nice  people  in  London  wrote  to  other  nice  people  they  knew 
who  were  also  wintering  on  the  Riviera,  and  soon  invitations 
came  to  me,  and  donkey  rides  and  picnickings  were  in  order 
(everyone  rode  donkeys  then)  into  the  beautiful  country  that 
lay  back  of  the  town,  and  an  occasional  peep  into  the  wicked 
but  lovely  Casino  at  Monte  Carlo  and  its  gardens.  In  short, 
I  found  life  both  interesting  and  gay. 

As  I  look  back  on  that  time  now,  as  I  compare  my  sudden 
yet  steady  recovery  from  the  deadly  threat  of  a  fatal  disease, 
I  see  I  had  a  close  shave  of  never  reaching  my  twentieth  year; 
but  fortunate  conditions  saved  me,  and  I  took  my  luck  with 
both  hands  and  a  firm  grip.  Many  years  after  I  was  to  watch 
one  of  my  "own  boys,"  the  ablest  assistant  I  ever  had  at  St. 
George's — and  if  I  am  any  judge  of  those  qualities  of  heart  and 
brain  that  go  to  the  making  of  a  great  preacher,  the  most  richly 
endowed  man  I  have  ever  known  among  the  younger  clergy — 
go  down  to  untimely  death,  only  because  the  glowing  ardour  of 
his  spirit  and  the  tongue  of  fire  within  him  could  not  brook  the 
hard  necessary  discipline  of  long  silence.  If  Alexis  Stein 
could  but  have  given  rein  to  the  earthly  side  of  himself  (and 


$6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

he  had  a  good  solid  chunk  of  the  earthly  in  him)  and  stretched 
out  idly  on  old  Mother  Earth's  bosom  for  a  couple  of  years,  the 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church  would  have  been  the  richer  for  a 
very  great  preacher  indeed.  God  knows  she  needs  such  to-day. 
However,  the  probability  is  she  would  have  unfrocked  him  for 
heresy,  as  Bishop  Walker  of  western  New  York  did  Doctor 
Crapsey  of  Rochester,  one  of  the  very  best  men  that  diocese 
ever  had,  one  of  the  best  preachers,  too,  and  a  man  who  loved 
and  understood  the  working  people. 

But  to  return  to  my  own  doings:  Gradually  I  found  my  walk- 
ing powers  coming  back  to  me.  I  used  steadily  to  practise 
climbing  up  the  steep  slope  of  the  Berceau  just  back  of  the  villa 
where  I  lived;  at  first  only  up  the  narrow  winding  paths  among 
the  lemon  groves;  and  later  higher,  to  the  rocky  boulder-strewn 
lands  above  them  where  in  sheltered  corners  bunches  of  wild 
narcissus  and  white  and  scarlet  tulips  grew. 

Two  things  out  of  the  common  happened  to  me  in  those 
life-giving  days.  I  had  a  bad  fall  coming  down  one  of  the 
mountains  and  for  the  first  and  last  time  in  my  life  I  got  drunk. 
I  will  tell  of  the  fall  first.  I  broke  two  of  my  ribs  and  made  a 
most  kind  and  helpful  friend.  The  Earl  of  Grosvenor  (later 
he  became  a  duke)  and  his  wife  were  among  my  acquaintances. 
They  invited  me  to  join  their  excursions,  and  as  I  was  a  better 
walker  than  most,  the  Earl  would  have  me  go  with  him  on 
some  of  the  longer  climbs  he  delighted  in.  On  one  of  these  we 
were  to  try  to  make  the  ascent  of  the  Grand  Mont,  a  long  way 
back  from  the  coast  and,  if  I  remember,  well  over  five  thousand 
feet  high.  By  this  time  the  patches  in  my  lungs  must  have 
mended  thoroughly,  for  I  could  walk.  We  started  early,  for  it 
was  a  long  grind,  got  to  the  summit  after  mid-day,  and  there 
rested  and  ate  our  sandwiches.  There  we  also  met  another 
party  as  energetic  as  ourselves;  they  proposed  a  race  to  the 
bottom,  so  off  we  sped.  Lord  Grosvenor  had  an  alpine  stock; 
I,  like  a  fool,  had  none.  As  we  neared  the  base  of  the  long  slope 
I  was  almost  done,  but  we  were  well  ahead  of  the  others.  Al- 
most at  the  bottom  I  caught  my  foot  in  a  creeper  and  lurched 
heavily  forward  and  downward  among  some  rough  rocks.  I 
was  too  much  "done"  to  save  myself,  and  the  fall  completely 
knocked  me  out.  When  I  came  to  Lord  Grosvenor  was  pour- 
ing brandy  down  my  throat,  and  it  surely  did  taste  good.     I  got 


I  GO  ABROAD  57 

on  my  feet  at  last,  with  a  cruel  pain  in  my  left  side.  For  a  time 
it  required  every  bit  of  will  power  I  had  to  stagger  along  with  the 
aid  of  an  alpine  stock  and  a  helping  arm.  The  pain  almost 
mastered  me,  but  gradually  I  was  able  to  straighten  up  a  bit 
and  managed  to  keep  going.  Indeed  there  was  nothing  else  to 
do,  unless  I  was  to  lie  out  all  night,  or  wait  for  hours  till  a 
stretcher  could  be  had,  for  villages  there  were  none,  and  the 
"terrain"  was  roadless. 

I  remember  that  the  first  part  of  that  return  march  seemed 
dreadfully  long,  but  pain  subsided  as  we  neared  the  town.  I 
went  straight  to  the  office  of  Doctor  Frank,  a  well-known  doctor 
in  those  days,  who  was  then  taking  winter  practice  in  Mentone. 
He  examined  my  ribs  and  said  I  was  lucky  and  young  and  made 
of  India  rubber.  He  put  a  bandage  on  and  let  me  go.  The 
ribs  stick  out  in  a  queer  way  to-day,  but  they  bothered  me 
very  little  and  I  was  soon  none  the  worse  for  the  fall. 

It  was  another  long  expedition,  and  it  was  my  determination  to 
walk  on  it  when  I  should  have  ridden  that  ended  in  my  tempo- 
rary lapse  from  sober  virtue.  The  picnic  was  at  Bordighera, 
and  I  cannot  remember  how  far  that  village  was  from  Mentone, 
but  it  was  a  good  way,  and  on  the  Corniche  road  the  spring 
sunshine  was  warm  and  the  dust  lay  deep.  The  company 
drove  to  the  rendezvous;  I  said  I'd  walk.  I  arrived  in  time 
for  luncheon,  hot  and  thirsty.  It  was  not  safe  in  those  days  to 
drink  from  the  wayside  rills  in  that  region,  for  every  one  of  them 
was  used  by  the  natives  for  washing  and  other  purposes. 
Thirsty  I  was,  and  a  good  long  glass  of  brown  Bavarian  beer 
was  a  drink  to  thank  the  gods  for.  My  experience  at  that  time 
of  the  varying  potency  of  stimulating  drinks,  was  limited  to 
what  my  dear  little  Welshman  helped  me  to;  he  and  I  shared 
always  a  bottle,  and  he  always  did  his  duty  by  at  least  one 
half  of  it.  I  knew  nothing  of  the  dangers  attending  mixed 
drinks,  more  especially  the  fatal  consequences  of  mixing 
beer  and  champagne.  We  were  young  and  hungry  and  gay; 
cool  champagne  there  was  in  plenty,  and  I  drank  more  of  it 
than  was  good  for  me,  and  did  not  realize  I  had  done  so  till 
luncheon  was  over,  and  I  tried  to  leave  the  table.  Then  indeed 
the  horror  of  it  all  seized  me.  My  brain  was  clear  but  my  legs 
unmanageable.  I  made  some  excuse  and  managed  to  stay 
where  I  was  till  I  could  see  some  way  to  escape  observation. 


58  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Then,  with  the  last  bit  of  will  power  I  had,  I  got  out  through 
some  back  door  and,  finding  the  shady  side  of  a  great  olive  tree, 
was  very  completely  sick.  That  made  matters  somewhat 
better.  One  good  fellow,  a  friend  of  mine,  saw  the  misery  I 
was  in,  and  leaving  the  party,  stayed  behind  to  help  me  out,  and 
so  I  got  started  on  my  return  journey  without  attracting  much 
attention.  After  a  mile  or  two  I  was  my  own  man  again,  but 
a  very  contrite  one,  I  assure  you.  At  last  I  got  home,  said  the 
sun  had  been  too  much  for  me,  and  dear  Miss  Newland  put  me 
to  bed. 

The  months  passed  all  too  quickly  at  Mentone.  There  were 
then  few  hotels  and  few  health-seekers.  Villa  life  was  the  cus- 
tomary thing,  and  there  and  at  Cannes  were  interesting  people 
from  many  lands  who  came  together,  not  to  spend  a  hurried 
week  or  two,  but  to  enjoy  the  winter  or  the  spring.  At  the 
Glyns'  villa  and  Lord  Grosvenor's  one  met  a  charming  and 
clever  set.  Mr.  Glyn's  brother  was  Gladstone's  whip  in  the 
House  of  Commons  (he  was  afterward  made  a  peer),  and 
these  two  houses  were  gathering  places  for  all  that  was  cleverest 
and  smartest  for  miles  round.  If  you  were  lucky  enough  to 
have  the  entree  to  them,  you  were  not  chilled  by  too  much 
ceremony,  and  you  were  sure  to  have  a  good  time.  Blumenthal 
stayed  at  the  Glyns',  and  when  the  nights  were  calm  a  small 
company  would  assemble  on  the  terrace  while  he  improvised 
for  an  hour  at  a  time. 

There  was  music,  too,  of  another  sort,  and  a  very  good  sort 
it  was.  From  the  little-known  country  back  of  the  town  came 
a  quartet  of  male  voices,  and  a  fifth  who  played  very  well 
indeed  on  the  violin.  Some  of  the  country  folk-songs  they  sang 
have  since  then  become  European  property,  and  sound  hack- 
neyed now.  Then  they  were  but  little  known,  and  to  me  they 
seemed  wild  and  sweet  and  often  very  moving.  These  people 
came  from  quite  a  long  way  back  in  the  hills,  and  usually  on 
Saturday  evenings.  They  thoroughly  enjoyed  their  own  sing- 
ing, and  were  not  a  bit  spoiled  by  our  enthusiastic  praise.  Their 
audiences  grew  from  week  to  week,  and  on  the  outside  of  our 
circle  the  young  men  and  girls  who  lived  near  by  came  to  listen 
and  applaud.  One  evening  our  orchestra,  during  a  pause  in  the 
programme,  burst  into  a  most  compelling  dance,  and — Italian, 
French,  and  English — we  were  all  dancing  before  we  knew  it. 


I  GO  ABROAD  59 

That  was  my  first  dancing  lesson,  and  my  agile  and  graceful 
partner  and  patient  teacher,  who  honoured  me  that  first  evening 
by  leading  me  out,  was  our  waitress  at  Miss  Newland's,  a  half- 
French,  half-Italian  girl.  I  was  awkward  as  a  cow,  I  know, 
but  she  persevered  with  me  that  evening,  and  many  an  evening 
afterward,  and  at  last  she  had  me  dancing  trois  temps,  deux 
temps,  and  schottische  pretty  well.    How  I  loved  it! 

I  have  often  wished  that  I  had  been  taught  to  dance  when  I 
was  a  boy,  or  that  even  at  this  time  I  had  followed  up  the  little 
knowledge  I  gained  by  taking  lessons;  but  among  my  people 
and  in  my  religious  party  prejudice  was  then  more  opposed  to 
dancing  than  it  is  now;  and  what  my  parents  wished  I  did  not 
question.  They  were  sure  that  dancing  was  worldly  and  not 
good  for  the  soul,  and  when  later  I  suggested  lessons  they  dis- 
approved and  that  ended  the  matter.  And  so  it  came  about 
that  my  only  dancing  memories  are  of  those  few  unforgettable 
nights  in  the  spring  of  1867,  when  I  did  my  best  to  learn  to 
dance  because  I  just  couldn't  help  it;  when  the  green  tree 
frogs  sang  in  chorus  over  our  heads,  and  the  heavy  odour  of  the 
orange  trees  mingled  with  the  faint  salt  breath  of  the  near-by 
sea. 

A  young  thing  that  wants  to  dance  and  has  never  been 
taught  to  dance  and  dance  well  misses,  I  think,  much  in  life 
that  we  cannot  afford  to  miss.  If  he  does  not  care  to  learn, 
even  then  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  unless  there  is  extreme 
repugnance  both  dancing  and  music  should  be  insisted  on.  In 
our  own  case,  we  could  not  persuade  our  sons  to  learn  the  piano 
or  take  dancing  lessons,  and  to-day  they  are  sorry  we  yielded  to 
their  boyish  and  valueless  opposition. 

Another  friend  I  made  at  this  time,  who  helped  me  in  many 
ways,  was  Theodore  Waterhouse,  a  brother  of  the  well-known 
London  architect.  He  gave  me  much  of  his  time,  and  his 
society  impressed  on  me  my  ignorance  of  almost  everything  a 
youth  should  know.  I  began  to  wonder  how  I  had  spent  so 
many  years  in  the  world  and  knew  so  little  about  it.  I  craved 
the  open,  that  I  knew;  everything  in  nature  appealed  to  me, 
and  by  myself  I  was  never  bored.  That,  as  I  look  back  on 
it  now,  was  something  gained.  My  love  of  nature  was  on  the 
way  to  save  me,  though  I  knew  it  not  then,  from  the  grosser 
temptations  that  bruise  and  brand  the  lives  of  so  many  in  school 


60  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

and  college  days.  But  I  had  not  yet  got  the  first  beginnings  of 
education — the  desire  to  know.  Theodore  Waterhouse  helped 
me  to  that  all-important  thing,  and  in  our  long  walks  together 
I  hung  on  every  word  he  said.  I  realized  that  I  had  been  an 
idler,  and  that  I  could  only  overcome  my  idleness  by  a  deter- 
mined change  in  habit. 

Let  me  put  down  here  something  that  I  hope  may  be  a  help 
to  some  reader  of  mine  who  thinks  that  because  a  job  does  not 
make  an  immediate  appeal  to  him  there  is  little  likelihood  of 
his  ever  accomplishing  it  successfully.  Hard  work  did  not 
attract  me  then — in  truth,  it  never  has — nor  have  any  rules 
I  made,  then  or  afterward,  changed  my  inborn  tendency  to  be 
an  intellectual  slacker.  Now  there  is  no  work  that  makes 
more  demand  on  all  you  have  within  you  than  composition, 
and  the  only  reason  I  ever  composed  anything  worth  listening 
to  was  that  rigorously  I  made  this  rule  and  kept  it.  Every 
week  of  my  life,  except  when  ill  or  on  holiday,  I  forced  myself, 
on  Tuesday  morning,  to  face  the  weekly  task  I  always  looked 
forward  to  without  any  relish  whatever,  of  composing  next 
Sunday's  message  to  my  people.  This  may  seem  a  strange 
confession  to  make,  but  it  is  the  truth  and  not  more  than  the 
truth.  I  am  not  over-stating  my  experience  when  I  say  my 
will  alone,  not  my  inclination,  closed  my  study  door  and  dragged 
me  to  my  chair. 

Times  without  number  I  produced  nothing  for  hours,  or 
put  down  stuff  fit  only  for  the  waste-paper  basket.  Sometimes 
I  could  find  no  anchorage  at  all,  but  till  I  had  got  something 
that  seemed  worth  saying  I  never  left  my  study  any  morning 
in  the  week.  I  don't  mean  to  say  that  ever  and  always  my 
sermons  came  so  painfully.  Sometimes,  on  the  contrary,  I  had 
a  flash  of  insight  as  soon  as  I  shut  my  door  on  the  outside  world. 
Sometimes,  more  even  than  that,  I  had  that  interior  joy  in 
composition  the  Bible  speaks  of:  "While  I  mused,  the  fire 
kindled,  and  at  the  last  I  spake  with  my  tongue."  But  this 
was  not  often.  What  I  got  habitually  that  was  worth  getting 
came  by  way  of  grind,  long,  patient  grind. 

Most  good  preachers  I  have  known,  whether  they  could  put 
their  best  on  paper  in  a  written  sermon,  as  did  Phillips  Brooks, 
or  commit  it  to  memory,  could  depend  on  memory  to  enable 
them  to  reproduce  the  substance  of  what  they  had  worked  out. 


I  GO  ABROAD  61 

Not  so  in  my  case.  There  my  head  failed  me  quite.  When  I 
had  down  on  paper  the  salient  points  of  what  I  had  painfully 
excogitated;  when  the  frame-work  of  it  had  been  written  and 
rewritten,  I  had  slowly  to  commit  the  whole  thing  to  memory. 
This  end  of  the  business  was  quite  as  distasteful  to  me  as  had 
been  the  halting  beginnings  of  the  sermon's  composition.  In 
this,  the  chief  work  of  a  preacher,  I  can  say  I  never  consciously 
eased  up  on  myself.  I  steadily  aimed  to  do  both  these  things. 
Unless  I  had  done  them  I  had  no  right  in  pulpit  or  on  platform, 
for  I  had  broken  my  contract  with  God,  my  own  conscience, 
and  those  who  honoured  me  with  their  attendance  and  atten- 
tion.    .     .     . 

All  of  which  may  seem  to  have  little  to  do  with  Theodore 
Waterhouse,  but  I  had  to  say  it  now  or  later,  and  Theodore 
Waterhouse  was  the  first  to  help  me  to  see  the  instant  need  I 
had  of  resolutely  disciplining  such  brains  as  were  mine,  if  I 
was  to  make  any  success  of  my  life  in  any  profession  whatever. 
I  had  not,  by  the  way,  at  that  time  the  faintest  idea  of  ever  be- 
coming a  clergyman.  When  we  parted,  Theodore  Waterhouse 
gave  me  "In  Memoriam."  It  was  my  first  introduction  to 
Tennyson.  I  had  till  then  read  no  poetry  but  Scott  and  a 
small  volume  of  verses  selected  for  school  declamation.  "In 
Memoriam  "  set  me  thinking  on  many  new  things.  During  the 
next  few  years  I  dropped  in  on  my  friend  constantly.  He 
had  chambers  near  the  Temple,  but  he  moved  in  one  circle, 
and  I  in  another,  and  the  intimacy  that  grew  between  us  during 
those  long  walks  that  unforgettable  spring  was  never  quite 
renewed.  While  I  was  a  curate  at  Norwich,  he  was  stricken 
with  a  mortal  illness,  and  on  his  death-bed  I  saw  him  for  the 
last  time.  He  died  as  he  lived,  thinking  of  and  for  others  rather 
than  of  himself. 

With  one  more  delightful  and  unexpected  experience  these 
golden  days  were  to  come  to  an  end.  I  received  one  day  a 
letter  from  my  Duchess  enclosing  a  cheque  for  fifty  pounds,  and 
telling  me  to  spend  it  in  seeing  as  much  of  Europe  as  I  could  on 
my  way  home.  I  made  that  cheque  go  far.  I  got  to  Florence 
in  time  to  see  the  wedding  fetes  of  Umberto  and  Marguerita, 
and  there  again  I  fell  on  my  feet,  for  Colonel  Strange  Jocelyn, 
the  son  of  Father's  friend  the  old  Earl  of  Roden,  was  at  the 
British  embassy. 


62  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Then  I  went  through  the  North  of  Italy — Padua,  Verona, 
and  made  a  stay  at  Venice.  I  tramped  all  round  the  Italian 
lakes  always  alone;  but  in  Switzerland  I  was  to  meet  a  youth, 
Frederick  N.  Charrington,  two  years  older  than  I  was,  who  in- 
fluenced my  whole  future. 

On  some  mountain  ramble,  I  cannot  remember  where  it  was, 
but  it  was  soon  after  I  crossed  the  Swiss  border,  I  had  sat  me 
down  to  eat  my  bread  and  Gruyere  cheese,  when  he  came  up. 
He  also  was  alone  and  was  abroad  for  the  first  time.  We 
talked  as  we  ate,  and  agreed  to  keep  together  for  a  day  or 
two.  He  had  lately  come  under  the  influence  of  some  reli- 
gious people,  and  was  more  than  ready  to  talk  about  his  salva- 
tion. I  tried  to  help  him,  and  we  felt  drawn  to  each  other. 
I  was  sure  I  was  saved — he  was  not  sure  at  all.  I  remember 
before  we  went  on  our  ways  we  knelt  down  there,  in  that  great 
mountain  solitude,  and  I  prayed. 

Fred  was  the  eldest  son  of  the  London  brewer  of  that  name. 
Well  advertised,  it  stares  at  you,  or  did  when  I  was  in  London, 
from  the  heavy  gilded  headboards  of  a  goodly  number  of  public 
houses  scattered  widely  all  over  the  metropolis.  In  the  '6o's 
the  drink  trade  had  become  well  organized  in  England,  specially 
in  London.  The  brewers  and  distillers  owned  the  public  houses 
between  them,  the  first  taking  two  thirds  of  the  value,  the 
second  the  other  third.  Their  control  was  practically  ab- 
solute. The  city  was  growing  then  at  a  rapid  rate,  and  as  the 
working  population  spread  out,  specially  to  east  and  south,  the 
"houses"  were  placed  in  strategic  positions,  a  gentlemanly 
agreement  existing  between  the  great  brewing  firms  not  un- 
duly to  intrude  into  each  other's  sphere  of  the  trade. 

Under  the  licensing  system,  order  was  maintained  and  the 
laws  as  to  hours  of  opening,  etc.,  were  obeyed.  The  houses 
closed  on  time,  and  drink  was  not  supposed  to  be  sold  to  minors, 
but  children  came  to  fetch  beer  for  their  parents,  and  under 
cover  of  this  and  a  host  of  convenient  excuses,  almost  any  one 
could  drink  to  excess.  There  was,  however,  none  of  the  black- 
mailing of  the  publicans  by  the  police  (one  of  our  municipal 
disgraces),  for  the  laws  were  liberal  and  were  obeyed.  I  was 
destined  to  see  a  good  deal  of  what  the  public  houses  were, 
and  what  they  did,  during  the  next  year. 


CHAPTER  VII 

The  East  End  of  London 

'Twas  August,  and  the  fierce  sun  overhead 

Smote  on  the  squalid  streets  of  Bethnal  Green 
And  the  -pale  weaver \  through  his  windows  seen 

In  Spitalfields,  looked  thrice  dispirited. 

I  met  a  preacher  there  I  knew,  and  said: 
"III  and  o'erworkedy  how/are  you  in  this  scene?" 

"  Bravely , "  said  he;  "for  I  of  late  have  been 
Much  cheered  with  thoughts  of  Christy  the  living  " bread" 

— Matthew  Arnold. 

Toward  the  close  of  the  '6o's,  thoughtful  people  in  the  old 
Land  were  beginning  to  have  serious  doubts  of  the  economic 
gospel  of  laissez  faire.  If  it  made  England  rich,  it  certainly 
was  not  making  it  happy  and  contented. 

The  Evangelicals  were  so  absorbed  in  saving  people's  souls 
that  they  left  the  masses  to  look  after  their  own  bodies;  and 
that  they  certainly  did  not  know  how  to  do  without  help  and  a 
better  education.  The  Evangelical  chapels  in  England  had 
no  "cure"  assigned  to  them.  They  had  no  parish  boundaries. 
Consequently,  a  class  congregation  grew  up.  The  poor  could 
not  afford  to  rent  pews,  and  the  chapels  lived  by  their  pew  rents; 
and  so  it  was  not  hard  to  foresee  what  must  take  place:  they 
might  reach  the  rich  and  the  middle  class;  they  certainly  could 
not  reach  the  poor,  and  they  never  did. 

Now  when  a  church  gets  away  from  the  poor,  it  may  make 
any  and  every  excuse  it  likes,  but  the  fact  remains  it  has  got 
away  from  its  Master.  Evangelicism  once  had  been  a  burning 
and  a  shining  light  because  it  went  to  the  poor.  Now  it  was 
more  fashionable.  Its  leaders,  lay  and  clerical,  met  once  a 
year  at  the  Mildmay  Conference  to  discuss  the  need  of  evan- 
gelizing England  and  saving  its  heathen;  but  the  sad  fact  was, 
the  party  had  become  a  preaching  party,  not  a  working  party, 

63 


64  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

and  so  was  in  danger  of  the  fate  of  the  unfortunate  Strasburg 
goose  who  was  so  stuffed  with  prepared  food  that  it  was  ready 
to  die  of  fatty  degeneration  of  the  liver. 

The  Evangelical  party  in  England  missed  its  great  oppor- 
tunity when  it  turned  a  deaf  ear  to  the  exceeding  bitter  cry  of 
Labour.  That  party's  failure  was  of  course  part  of  a  universal 
failure.  All  the  churches  failed  alike.  The  question  is  still 
asked,  "Why  do  you  find  so  small  a  representation  of  labour  in 
any  Christian  church?"  The  Church's  advocates  dislike  to 
make  the  true  answer,  but  only  one  can  be  made.  It  is  be- 
cause organized  Christianity  took  the  wrong  side  in  those 
times  of  change  of  which  I  write.  Wholly  intent  on  saving 
men's  souls  from  a  distant  Hell,  they  left  them  to  suffer  in  a  very 
real  present  Hell.  Had  Evangelicism  sought  to  save  body  and 
soul  as  did  Jesus — yes,  put,  as  He  did,  the  body  and  the  body's 
wants  first — then  the  attitude  of  Labour  to  organized  Christian- 
ity could  not  be  what  it  is  to-day. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that,  in  the  early  centuries  of  our  era, 
the  Church  was  very  generally  on  the  right  side,  the  side  of  the 
poor.  In  much  later  times,  when  the  liberties  of  England  were 
threatened,  the  Bishops  had  proved  equal  to  the  crisis,  and 
had  gone  to  the  Tower  sooner  than  bow  to  the  Tyrant  King.1 
And  for  the  sake  of  that  brave  deed,  much  was  forgiven  the 
national  church  clergy.  Now  another  tyranny,  the  tyranny 
of  wealth,  more  insidious,  more  pervasive,  at  least  as  fatal  to 
the  nation's  well-being,  threatened  the  land.  But  there  was 
only  feeble  protest  raised  in  unofficial  quarters,  or  no  protest 
at  all.  The  English  Church  was  on  the  wrong  side.  Her 
prophets  were  confused,  misled,  unseeing.  Vision  had  failed 
England.  "And  where  no  vision  is,  the  people  perish,"  says 
the  Bible. 

Politically,  educationally,  sociologically,  there  was  dreadful 
need  of  reform.  The  housing  conditions  of  the  working  people 
were  awful,  hours  of  labour  intolerably  long.  In  the  country 
things  were  nearly  as  bad.  Men  were  expected  to  work  twelve 
hours  a  day,  for  a  wage  of  from  nine  shillings  (in  some  counties), 
to  fourteen  shillings  a  week  in  others.  At  such  a  wage,  a 
family  of  five  children  could  not  have  sufficient  nutritive  food. 

1Archbishop  Sancroft  and  his  six  suffragan  bishops  defied  James  II,  and  were  sent  to  the  Tower. 
All  England  cheered  when  even  a  packed  jury  said: "  Not  guilty." 


THE  EAST  END  OF  LONDON  65 

The  cottage  they  lived  in,  if  sometimes  picturesque,  was  often 
unsanitary. 

In  the  great  towns  millions  lived — was  it  living? — without 
joy  or  leisure  or  outlook,  in  miles  and  miles  of  slums,  sunk  in  a 
life  as  gray  and  sordid  and  uniformly  ugly  as  were  the  crowded, 
unsanitary  hovels  they  called  homes.  A  sick  child,  a  funeral, 
or  a  week's  unemployment,  and  all  savings  were  gone,  prob- 
ably some  things  pawned,  and  the  wolf  at  the  door. 

On  these  injustices,  on  the  crime  against  the  child  life  of 
England,  all  the  churches  officially  were  dumb.  In  the  coun- 
try, and  very  occasionally  in  the  city,  the  national  church  still 
ministered  to  the  poor,  chiefly  to  the  retarded,  ignorant,  and 
unprogressive  poor.  Her  seats  were  free  and  many  of  her 
clergy  faithfully  visited  their  flocks.  But  these  good  men  did 
not  understand,  much  less  were  they  ready  to  grapple  with, 
the  vast  changes  that  were  spreading  over  the  land.  By  long 
tradition,  they  were  opposed  to  change.  The  preparation  they 
had  received  before  taking  Holy  Orders  was  really  ludicrous  in 
its  inadequacy  in  the  things  it  demanded  and  did  not  demand. 
So  the  University  did  not  help  them  before  they  were  ordained, 
nor  did  the  Bishops  they  served  under  help  them  after.  For 
these  got  their  Bishoprics  either  on  account  of  their  standing  as 
scholars,  or  more  often  because  they  or  their  families  could 
command  influence  with  the  Prime  Minister. 

The  Methodists  and  Baptists  were  losing  the  poor,  for  those 
churches  had  not  organized  themselves  to  reach  the  factory 
workers.  The  Roman  Catholic  Church  was  then  astutely 
planning  her  campaign  to  win  a  wider  social  recognition  in  the 
land,  and  so  deemed  it  wiser  policy  to  leave  dangerously  radical 
questions  alone.  Then  lastly,  there  was  the  young  and  vigor- 
ous High  Church  party,  but  it  was  fighting  so  fiercely  for 
vestments,  candles,  and  the  mass,  that  as  yet  it  had  not  had 
time  to  notice  England's  sin  against  her  poor. 

Manchesterism,  to  coin  an  ugly  word,  was  essentially  un- 
christian, and  had  soaked  into  the  national  life  everywhere. 
It  denied  that  the  Golden  Rule  had  any  application  in  busi- 
ness. "Do  as  you  would  be  done  by"  might  apply  within 
limitations  to  your  friends;  it  had  no  practical  reference  what- 
ever to  your  labouring  people.  And  so  it  was  that  the  financial 
growth  of  England  in  those  years  numbed  and  paralyzed  the 


66  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

spirit  of  all  the  churches,  hid  from  them  the  progressive  degrada- 
tion of  Labour,  and  deafened  and  blinded  them  to  the  Command 
of  God  and  the  cry  of  perishing  men. 

Many  books  have  been  written  to  account  for  the  fact  that 
the  churches  one  and  all  have  well-nigh  lost  the  great  working 
class.  I  have  not  found  this  explanation  in  any  I  have  read, 
but  I  think  it  the  chief  reason  for  their  lamentable  failure  then 
and  their  lost  leadership  now. 

The  gist  of  the  popular  economic  teachings  of  that  day  was 
that  safety  and  progress  lay  in  leaving  things  alone.  Then  the 
best  would  inevitably  come  to  the  front,  whether  the  best  in 
men  or  in  manufactured  goods.  The  theory  of  life  at  the  basis 
of  the  Christian  religion  is  the  opposite,  the  antithesis  of  this — 
it  is  evolutionary.  If  you  leave  things  alone  they  will  in- 
evitably revert — no  advance,  no  reform  can  come  by  any  other 
road  than  that  of  struggle,  and  what  is  so  won  can  by  struggle 
alone  be  retained. 

Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  when  orthodox  religion  had  been 
badly  defeated  in  its  own  chosen  field,  from  a  source  she  had 
derided  and  defied  help  was  to  come  to  the  cause  she  had  lost. 
A  small  and  discredited  group  of  scientists  were  at  that  day 
beginning  to  open  to  the  wide  world  a  new  page  in  the  story 
of  the  old  world.  Evolution  was  to  explain  how  man,  nature's 
last  product,  emerges  from  the  long  welter  of  cosmic  struggle, 
in  order  that  he  should,  as  leader,  guardian,  saviour,  and 
brother,  change  and  order  nature  to  his  will.  Truly  a  new 
meaning  to  life,  a  new  call  to  service,  and  the  Golden  Rule 
reasserted  in  new  and  compelling  terms. 

Coleridge  said:  "What  we  denounce  as  error  may  be  but  the 
refraction  of  some  great  truth  as  yet  below  the  horizon."  The 
theory  of  evolution  was  a  long  way  below  the  horizon  then  oi 
well-educated  people.  To  most  it  seemed  a  degrading  and 
unworthy  theory.  As  for  religious  people  in  all  the  churches, 
they  raged  at  it.  And  small  wonder,  since  the  most  influential 
of  contemporary  Englishmen,  W.  E.  Gladstone,  who  for  a 
time  laid  on  England  his  wordy  spell,  had  no  other  greetings  for 
it  than  fatuously  to  oppose  to  it  his  essays  on  "The  Sure  Rock 
of  Holy  Scripture."  Of  course  Mr.  Gladstone  never  even 
dimly  grasped  the  significance  of  religious  evolution,  but  his 
attempt  to  answer  it  by  revamping  an  exploded  theory  of  in- 


THE  EAST  END  OF  LONDON  67 

spiratlon  illustrates  the  changes  that  have  passed  over  our 
world  since  those  days. 

As  for  me,  I  did  not  begin  to  read  Darwin  and  his  great  ex- 
positor, Huxley,  till  ten  years  later.  Then  I  had  growing 
pains. 

Drink,  as  any  one  could  see,  was  an  immediate  cause  of  the 
social  tragedy;  but  men  and  women  and  even  children  drank 
because  alcohol  and  the  public  house  were  their  one  poor  ref- 
uge from  an  unrighteously  imposed  toil,  and  a  condition  that 
human  nature  was  not  intended  or  fitted  to  endure. 

The  deeper  causes  their  would-be  helpers  did  not  at  first  see; 
the  root  reforms  needed  they  did  not  know.  They  went  to 
help  the  helpless — those  I  went  with  went  to  save  their  souls. 
And  some  were  saved  and  helped  and  cheered,  and  a  little 
breach  at  least  was  made  in  the  Chinese  Wall  separating  man 
from  his  fellow. 

The  national  church  had  acted  the  part  of  "the  priest  and 
the  Levite"  in  the  tragedy  of  the  wounded  man  fallen  among 
thieves.  And  the  little  band  I  knew  were  trying  to  staunch  his 
wounds  and  save  his  life,  even  though  they  were  not  adepts  in 
antiseptic  sociological  surgery. 

In  time  there  came  to  England  the  knowledge  of  a  great 
wrong,  a  great  need,  and  a  great  danger.  Then  a  tardy  awak- 
ening of  public  conscience,  and  finally  legislative  enactment 
and  reform.  But  neither  in  England  nor  in  the  United  States 
has  the  gravity  of  the  danger  of  leaving  the  labouring  masses 
of  the  cities  to  neglect  and  exploitation  been  realized  yet. 

When  I  returned  home  in  1868,  full  of  health  and  good 
resolutions,  I  had  never  heard  of  the  East  Side.  I  was  intent 
on  passing  in  due  time  the  competitive  examination  into 
Woolwich,  for  a  commission  in  the  Royal  Artillery.  So  I 
settled  down  to  work  at  Thurlow  Square  with  a  coach. 

My  father  had  no  district  assigned  to  his  church,  nor,  if  he 
had,  was  there  anything  in  his  training  or  disposition  that 
fitted  him  to  organize  it  for  church  work.  He  visited  in  Ire- 
land, he  visited  in  London;  preaching  and  visiting  were  what 
he  was  consecrated  to  attend  to.  Indeed,  there  was  little  or- 
ganized parish  work  of  any  sort  in  those  days.  Frequent 
communions  and  church  services  in  high  churches;  prayer 
meetings  and  Bible  readings  in  low  churches  and  dissenting 


68  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

churches :  there  the  function  of  the  Church  began  and  ended. 
Of  course,  very  great  change  came  soon.  But  the  point  I 
want  to  make  is  that  in  effecting  those  changes,  in  the  awak- 
ening of  the  Church's  conscience  to  the  cry  of  the  wounded 
and  abandoned  man,  those  people  who  attempted  to  aid  great 
East  London  broke  the  ice  and  led  the  way,  all  honour  to 
them. 

A  member  of  Belgrave  Chapel  congregation,  Miss  E.  Logan, 
was  one  of  the  first  of  these,  and  she  gathered  a  little  group 
round  her.  Lord  and  Lady  Ripon  (Lord  Ripon  was  afterward 
Governor  General  of  India)  led  another  group.  I  have  no 
doubt  there  were  others  like  them,  but  these  I  knew. 

One  afternoon,  when  my  studies  were  over,  a  friend  of  my 
father's,  Admiral  Fishbourne,  called  at  the  house  and  asked 
for  me.  I  did  not  know  him  well  and  was  taken  aback  when, 
in  his  abrupt  way,  he  said:  "Willie,  I  am  come  to  take  you  with 
me  to  Bethnal  Green.  Bring  your  Bible  with  you."  The  old 
Admiral  (he  was  retired)  had  a  plan.  Why  he  conceived  it  I 
never  knew,  but  great  things  in  our  lives  often  spring  from 
trifling  things,  and  in  my  case  the  good  old  seaman's  secret 
unspoken  plan  was  to  change  all  my  life.  It  seemed  to  me  a 
long  journey  to  that  far-off  East  Side,  in  those  halting  omni- 
buses. I  had  never  been  east  of  the  Tower  of  London  before, 
but  at  last  we  arrived,  and  we  stood  before  a  mean  little  Baptist 
chapel  off  the  Mile  End  Road.  The  place  was  crowded  with 
young  and  middle-aged  mothers,  each  trying  to  take  care  of  a 
baby  while  she  sewed.  A  gray-faced  congregation,  in  a  build- 
ing gray  and  dreary. 

Our  arrival  was  evidently  timed  to  correspond  with  the  close 
of  the  working  hours,  and  the  welcome  advent  of  tea  and  well- 
served  bread  and  butter.  Miss  Logan  and  the  ladies  helping 
her  were  passing  round  the  food  and  giving  to  each  of  the 
mothers  sixpence  for  the  three  hours'  work  done.  The  gar- 
ments they  made  they  could  buy  at  cost  price.  When  tea  was 
over,  all  sang  a  hymn,  and  the  Admiral,  evidently  known  and 
approved  of  by  them  all,  took  his  Bible  out  of  his  pocket  and 
made  an  address  for  some  fifteen  minutes.  He  knew  what  he 
could  not  do,  so  he  spoke  very  briefly,  and  when  the  end  came 
rather  suddenly,  he  sprung  on  his  audience  and  on  me,  the 
scared  victim  of  it,  his  plot.     "I  have  brought  here  to-day," 


THE  EAST  END  OF  LONDON  69 

said  he,  "the  eldest  son  of  the  Rev.  Marcus  Rainsford,  of 
Belgrave  Chapel,  and  he  will  speak  to  you,  my  friends,  better 
than  I  can."  What  his  reason  for  calling  on  a  lad  not  yet 
eighteen,  all  unprepared,  to  rise  and  speak  before  fashionable 
ladies  he  knew  and  some  four  hundred  poor  souls  he  did  not, 
I  never  knew.  But  that  was  what  he  did;  and  no  protest  I 
could  make,  and  I  protested  vigorously,  could  save  me  from 
my  fate  that  day.  How  I  got  on  my  feet  I  don't  know.  I  fum- 
bled the  pages  of  my  pocket  Bible,  but  could  not  see  to  read 
them.  I  looked  with  unseeing  eyes  on  the  poor,  worn  gray 
faces  before  me,  and  was  just  aware  that  they  were  as  much 
surprised  as  I  was.  Some  of  them  pitied  me,  I  know,  for»when 
it  was  over  and  I  made  my  way  to  the  door  they  cried,  "  Come 
back  and  speak  to  us  again  next  Tuesday." 

What  happened  was  this:  I  stood  and  gasped  and  muttered 
something,  while  the  smoky,  unwashed  windows  grew  dark, 
and  the  gray  faces  merged  into  one  colourless  mass.  I,  who 
knew  my  Bible  from  cover  to  cover,  never  found  a  text.  I 
seemed  gradually  to  grow  numb  from  my  feet  up  to  the  tip 
of  my  tongue.  No  help,  no  light  came  to  me,  no  coherent 
word  to  my  audience — that  I  am  sure  of — and  in  a  few  minutes 
I  sat  down. 

As  I  took  the  long  walk  home  by  myself  (for  the  old  Admiral 
kept  out  of  my  way),  a  new  resolve  came  to  me.  I  would  not 
be  so  beaten.  I  would  go  back  the  next  week,  I  would  stand 
in  that  poor  little  chapel  and  speak  to  those  burdened  folk. 
I  would  say  something  to  cheer  and  help  them. 

Here  let  me  be  honest.  The  impelling  motive  to  return 
was  quite  as  much  to  retrieve  myself  as  to  help  them.  This  is 
a  sad  confession,  but  it  is  the  truth.  I  don't  know  what 
psychological  effect  of  so  crushing  a  failure  has  been  in  the 
case  of  others;  I  know  what  it  was  on  me.  (My  failure  there, 
by  the  way,  was  not  my  last,  by  any  means.  I  made  just  as 
bad  a  break-down  at  the  church  congress  in  Boston,  in  1876. 
Of  that,  later.)  I  determined  not  to  be  beaten.  I  had  then 
no  distinct  sense  of  a  message  to  deliver;  that  came  slowly, 
and  later.  I  did  of  course  mightily  want  to  cheer  those  poor 
worn  mothers,  but  far  more  I  wanted  to  gain  control  of  myself. 
So  back  I  went  the  following  week. 

Before  the  next  Tuesday  I  thought  a  good  deal  on  what  I 


70  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

intended  to  say;  probably  my  little  discourse  was  largely  bor- 
rowed from  some  sermon  I  had  heard  or  read,  but  when  on  my 
feet  the  second  time,  I  very  nearly  lost  all  control  of  myself 
again,  and  floundered  and  blundered  even  in  the  reading  of  my 
text.  But  soon,  from  somewhere,  there  came  to  me  a  new 
consciousness  of  a  new  power.  I  can  liken  it  only  to  my  first 
sense  of  conquest  when,  after  choking  and  floundering  and 
sinking  in  the  Dundalk  river,  I  suddenly  felt  myself  actually 
smoothly  swimming  just  a  few  yards.  So  it  was  now.  Before 
I  knew  it  I  had  forgotten  W.  S.  R.  entirely,  and  I  was  talking, 
not  to  the  poor  draggled  bonnets  or  the  mass  of  wan  faces 
beneath  them,  but  to  human  souls  looking  at  me  out  of  human 
eyes.  And  a  newer  power  fell  on  me,  and  a  deeper  desire  to 
understand  and  uplift.  And  out  of  me  went — I  knew  it,  I 
felt  it — some  cheer,  some  courage,  some  hope,  to  that  room- 
ful of  mothers  in  Bethnal  Green. 

As  I  look  back  now  to  that  day,  that  momentous  day  for  me, 
how  tangled,  how  mixed,  how  inextricably  interwoven,  were 
the  chains  of  egoism  and  self-assertion  and  those  higher  forces 
of  charity  and  compassion,  that  mingled  in  the  making  of  that 
first  poor  boyish  offering  of  mine.  "If  thou,  O  Lord,  wert 
extreme  to  mark  what  is  done  amiss,  O  Lord,  who  should  abide 
it?"  So  I  became  a  weekly  fixture  at  Miss  Logan's  sewing 
class. 

At  this  time  I  met  another  young  man,  five  years  older  than 
I,  who  became  my  fast  friend,  Herbert  Watney.  Afterward 
he  married  my  eldest  sister,  Sarah.  He  had  become  intensely 
religious,  and  something  had  moved  him  to  take  an  interest  in 
the  social  problems  of  the  city.  His  people  were  brewers.  The 
firm  in  which  he  was  a  partner  one  of  the  richest  in  London; 
and  on  his  own  account,  very  unostentatiously,  he  had  for  some 
time  been  going  round  to  the  public  houses  that  bore  his  name. 
The  survey  profoundly  disgusted  him.  He  sought  out  those 
who  were  visiting  the  East  End,  and  finding  Miss  Logan  at 
work  there,  volunteered  to  assist  in  any  way  she  desired.  He 
was  no  good  at  speaking,  so  he  undertook  the  heavy  job  of 
securing  accurate  information  about  hundreds  of  families  that 
seemed  in  danger  of  complete  collapse. 

Just  then  a  shortage  of  employment  intensified  a  normally 
bad  condition,  and  it  was  suggested  that  the  best  thing  to  do 


THE  EAST  END  OF  LONDON  71 

was  to  help  families  that  were  in  danger  of  sinking  into  helpless 
poverty  to  emigrate  to  Canada. 

Herbert  Watney  and  I  were  put  on  the  job  of  searching  out 
and  selecting  those  who  were  willing  to  make  the  great  ex- 
periment, and  who  seemed  likely  to  make  a  success  of  it  under 
new  conditions.  He  gave  up  everything  else,  for  the  time  be- 
ing, and  almost  alone  got  together  a  band  of  some  eight  hun- 
dred men  and  women  and  children.  Later  they  gave  a  good 
account  of  themselves  in  the  new  land. 

The  Canadian  authorities  were  consulted,  and  we  were  as- 
sured that  there  would  be  no  difficulty  in  placing  these  people 
in  the  province  of  Ontario.  They  all  of  them  had  a  trade, 
and  out  there  they  were  to  work  at  it.  Matters  moved  rapidly 
then.  It  was  decided  to  send  someone  over  to  see  to  details 
and  report  on  results.  Watney  volunteered  to  go  and  asked  me 
to  go  with  him  as  his  guest  and  assistant.  It  was  a  temptation 
not  to  be  resisted  and,  having  obtained  my  parents'  consent, 
I  gladly  agreed  to  go. 

My  story  is  destined  to  record  many  a  confession,  and  now  I 
must  make  another.  It  is  true  I  wanted  to  aid  my  poor  women 
folk.  Many  of  my  weekly  congregation  at  Mile  End  were 
numbered  in  this  emigrant  band.  But  quite  as  much  did  I 
want  to  see  that  new  western  land  that  everyone  was  talking  of. 
And,  having  seen  it,  I  had  a  compelling  determination  not  to 
return  till  I  had  feasted  my  eyes  on  that  still  farther-off  land,  as 
yet  but  little  known,  where  hundreds  of  miles  of  rolling  prairie 
stretched  on  and  on  to  the  bases  of  a  mighty  mountain  chain. 
The  story  books  Father  had  read  by  the  old  vicarage  fireside, 
the  tales  of  Indians,  buffalo,  and  grizzly  bears,  all  crowded 
back  on  my  memory;  and  between  my  hope  successfully  to 
guide  my  poor  people  and,  after  that,  to  see  with  my  own 
eyes  this  land  of  wonder  and  romance,  I  had  an  exciting  time. 

My  friend  was  not  as  keen  for  the  Indian  country  as  I  was, 
but  he  proved  persuadable.  There  seemed  no  reason  why, 
when  the  business  part  of  our  journey  was  over,  we  should  not 
at  least  ride  far  enough  west  to  see  something  of  Indian  life  and 
the  great  buffalo  herds.  So  on  so  much  we  agreed,  leaving 
all  details  of  our  plans  to  be  worked  out  later,  as  circumstances 
should  dictate. 

What  became  of  the  Woolwich  scheme  and  my  hope  for  an 


72  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

artillery  commission?  you  may  ask.  Well,  I  had  not  given 
it  up;  but  a  bird  in  the  hand  is  worth  two  in  the  bush,  specially 
when  you  are  eighteen,  and  this  bird  looked  like  a  bird  of 
Paradise  to  me. 

Enfin,  early  in  the  spring  of  1869,  we  sailed  in  the  good  ship 
Nestorian,  2,000  tons,  of  the  Allan  Line,  for  Quebec.  We  had 
a  rough  voyage  of  fourteen  days,  and  well  I  remember  I  was 
dreadfully  seasick. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

The  Great  Lone  Land  and  the  Indian  Country  in  1869 

Who  hath  smelt  wood-smoke  at  twilight  ?    Who  hath  heard  the  birch- 
log  burning ? 
Who  is  quick  to  read  the  noises  of  the  night  ? 

Let  him  follow  with  the  others,  for  the  Young  Men's  feet  are  turning 
To  the  camps  of  proved  desire  and  known  delight. 

— Kipling. 

In  the  early  spring  of  1869  H.  W.  and  I  sailed  up  the  St. 
Lawrence  and  anchored  under  Quebec.  I  am  glad  I  saw  it 
before  the  hand  of  change  had  made  it  what  it  is  to-day. 
Chateau  Frontenac  was  then  undreamed  of.  The  ancient 
fortress  frowned  on  the  St.  Lawrence  grim  and  bare,  just  as 
it  had  faced  Wolf's  fleet  more  than  one  hundred  years  before. 

One  thing  Quebec  had,  that  spring  morning  when  first  I 
saw  it,  that  it  has  lost,  I  fear,  for  ever.  Its  lilacs !  On  the  wide 
terraces  that  looked  down  on  the  river  they  were  in  bloom. 
In  rows  and  thickets  they  crowded  everywhere,  masking  the 
batteries  of  old  smooth-bore  cannon,  and  draping  with  their 
spring  garlands  the  gray  brows  of  the  ancient  town. 

From  Quebec  we  went  to  Toronto.  There  the  Ontario 
Immigration  authorities  took  our  business  in  hand,1  and  very 
quickly  found  work  for  our  East  Londoners  in  that  and  the 
neighbouring  towns.  Canada  was  greatly  in  need  of  workers 
then.  Our  people  had  their  trades,  and  on  the  whole  they  did 
very  well,  but  gradually  the  greater  part  of  them  drifted 
across  the  border,  where  wages  were  higher  and  the  cities  larger 
and  more  lively.  A  born  Londoner  cannot  be  happy  in  the 
village  or  even  in  the  country  town;  the  city  is  in  his  blood, 
and  he  must  seek  it. 

If  I  were  dead,  and  some  kind  friend  of  mine  were  writing 
this  biography  for  me,  he  would  make  this  first  visit  of  mine 

JThc  settlement  of  800  East  London  Immigrants. 

73 


74  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

to  this  country  chiefly  important  because  it  afforded  me  an 
opportunity  for  comparing  the  problems  of  church  and  city 
life  in  the  new  land  with  those  in  the  old,  and  so  laying  the 
foundation  for  future  usefulness.  As  I  am  alive  and  writing  it 
myself,  I  must  confess  that  as  soon  as  the  immigration  agents 
had  taken  our  people  off  our  hands,  one  idea,  one  desire,  and 
one  alone,  possessed  me.  I  longed  with  a  great  longing  to  feast 
my  eyes  on  that  land  of  wonder  that  I  had  read  about  since  I 
could  read  at  all.  The  world  has  changed  greatly  in  these 
last  epoch-making  fifty  years,  changed  I  believe  in  most  things 
for  the  better,  but  changes  great  as  those  that  have  passed, 
mean  losses,  too,  and  boys  of  to-day  have  never  had  offered 
them  what  fortune  offered  me.  We  have  gained  civilization,  the 
telephone,  the  aeroplane,  and  wireless  telegraphy,  but  we  have 
lost,  at  least  in  part,  the  fascination  of  facing  the  unknown. 

"He  was  the  first  that  ever  burst  into  that  lonely  sea."  If 
that  is  an  over-statement,  at  least  it  is  true  that  the  unknown 
was  larger,  closer,  more  alluring  to  a  youth  then  than  it  is  now, 
and  never  was  there  a  boy  worth  his  salt  in  any  age,  or  nation, 
or  time,  whose  dreams  and  visions  were  not  coloured  by  it. 

So  I  longed  for  that  frontier  where  real  Indians  roved. 
Longed  to  feast  my  eyes  on  that  great  prairie  land  and  the 
mountains  beyond  still  unmapped,  that  had  lain  for  untold  ages 
untouched,  unchanged.  Now  by  the  iron  roads  of  trans- 
continental railways,  pushing  fast  to  the  westward,  its  con- 
querors were  preparing  to  overwhelm  it  suddenly.  I  was  only 
just  in  time  to  see  its  real  frontier  and  the  glorious  continent 
beyond  it  in  all  their  savagery,  before  they  became  things  of 
the  past.  Only  just  in  time  to  enter  into  that  part  of  it  which 
was  about  to  pass  away.  To  live  in  the  Indians'  tepee,  ride 
side  by  side  with  the  naked  warrior  band,  as  with  shrill  war- 
whoop  it  recklessly  charged  into  the  thundering  mass  of  the 
stampeded  buffalo  herd. 

As  I  look  back  on  it  I  see  how  ridiculously  unprepared  we 
were  for  the  adventure  that  thrust  itself  on  us.  We  had 
planned  for  a  visit  to  the  prairie,  and  an  extended  buffalo  hunt, 
and  nothing  more.  Before  we  knew  it  we  were  involved  in  a 
serious  and  in  some  parts  dangerous  journey  to  the  Pacific 
Ocean,  and  through  a  region  much  of  which  was  practically 
unknown  and  infested  by  hostile  Indian  tribes. 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  75 

As  we  travelled,  my  friend  and  I,  as  far  as  the  railroad  would 
take  us  to  westward,  we  made  diligent  inquiries  about  the 
prairie  regions,  how  to  get  there,  and  what  paraphernalia  to 
take.  No  one  we  had  the  fortune  to  meet  seemed  to  know  any 
more  about  them  than  we  did,  and  our  own  knowledge  was  no 
later  or  more  accurate  than  that  conveyed  by  Main  Reed's  or 
Ballantine's  romances.  From  England  we  had  brought  guns 
and  rifles,  and  in  the  choice  of  the  rifles,  at  least,  my  complete 
ignorance  of  what  a  traveller  in  our  land  of  promise  needed  was 
illustrated. 

The  Marquis  of  Westminster1 — my  Mentone  friend — was 
an  enthusiastic  volunteer,  one  of  the  most  influential  promoters 
of  that  movement  in  England.  He  naturally  was  an  expert  on 
all  matters  of  rifle-range  shooting,  and  when  he  knew  I  was 
going  to  the  West,  he  loaned  me  one  of  his  pet  rifles,  a  wonderful 
weapon  for  thousand-yard  shooting,  but  about  as  useless  a 
rifle  for  the  practical  purpose  of  killing  your  dinner  as  could 
well  be  carried.  Before  I  left  London  I  fear  I  talked  rifles  im- 
moderately to  my  friends.  One  of  them  told  me  to  go  to 
Rigby  (at  that  time  the  best  rifle  maker  in  England)  and  order 
from  him  any  weapon  I  chose.  I  had  a  long  interview  with 
that  great  man,  who  recommended  a  new  weapon  he  was  then 
turning  out  called  an  express  rifle.  It  carried  a  small  bullet, 
and  had  behind  it  a  heavy  charge  of  powder.  This  gave  the 
bullet  great  pace  and  a  low  trajectory,  which  Mr.  Rigby  tried 
to  convince  me  were  the  essential  things  in  a  game  rifle.  I 
remained  interested  but  quite  unconvinced;  and  so,  seeing  he 
could  not  make  any  impression  on  my  ignorance,  he  sold  me  the 
sort  of  rifle  I  wanted,  or  thought  I  wanted;  an  excellent  weapon 
for  jungle  shooting  in  India,  if  you  had  to  depend  for  your  life 
on  your  straight  shooting  at  twenty  yards  or  under;  but  for 
killing  game  at  ordinary  open  country  distances,  or  for  carrying 
on  horseback,  my  beautiful  and  expensive  "Rigby"  was  as  un- 
suited  as  the  other  rifle. 

I  had  pictured  the  American  buffalo,  after  the  manner  of  the 
story  book,  as  a  fearsome  beast,  requiring  a  formidable  amount 
of  powder  and  lead  to  kill,  and  of  buffalo  I  was  of  course  think- 
ing when  I  got  my  rifle.     I  was  to  find  him  just  as  easy,  if  you 

xThe  Earl  of  Grosvenor  on  his  father's  death  had  succeeded  to  the  Marquisate — was  after- 
ward made  a  Duke. 


y6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

hit  him  in  the  right  place,  and  just  as  hard  if  you  hit  him  in  the 
wrong,  as  the  domestic  cow.  But,  as  I  have  just  said,  swayed 
by  the  fascination  of  the  totally  unknown,  I  had  grossly 
magnified  the  terrors  of  my  intended  victim,  and  had  insisted 
on  a  double-barrel  rifle  shooting  a  bullet  almost  as  large  as  an 
egg,  and  taking  six  drachms  of  powder.  This  instrument  of 
death  naturally  had  weight — fourteen  good  pounds  it  weighed — 
and  oh,  how  my  unknit  shoulders  and  back  suffered  and  pro- 
tested, as  mile  after  mile,  day  after  day,  month  after  month,  on 
level  prairie  and  up  precipitous  mountain  slope;  on  smoothly 
gaited  and  on  painfully  roughly  gaited  horses,  I  toted  that 
rifle!  From  St.  Paul,  Minnesota,  to  the  headquarters  of  the 
22nd.  U.  S.  Infantry  at  Kettle  Falls,  on  the  Columbia  River, 
more  than  two  thousand  miles  by  the  way  we  went.  Carrying 
that  rifle  was  a  feat  I  am  still  proud  of.  For  when  I  started  on 
the  long  journey  I  was  my  present  height,  but  I  weighed  only 
one  hundred  and  forty  pounds.  I  certainly  could  not  carry 
that  rifle  over  the  same  road  now;  so  much  for  the  toughness  of 
an  enthusiastic  youth  in  his  teens. 

In  St.  Paul,  we  first  came  into  touch  with  frontier  life,  and  at 
last  met  some  who  could  give  us  information,  very  imperfect 
though  it  was,  about  the  country  to  westward.  As  soon  as 
the  armies  of  the  North  and  South  were  disbanded  in  1865, 
thousands  of  soldiers  whose  family  ties  had  been  broken,  or 
who  had  never  had  any  family  ties,  made  their  way  to  the 
West.  Some  went  because  their  war  experience  had  widened 
and  stimulated  them;  they  sought  new  homes  and  larger  life. 
This  the  great  empty  Indian  land  offered  to  all  who  would  work 
and  were  attracted  by  its  spice  of  adventure.  Besides  these 
there  were  (especially  in  those  first  years  after  the  war)  a 
considerable  number  of  undesirables,  the  scum,  the  vagabond- 
age, of  its  great  hosts.  Restless,  undisciplined,  sometimes 
criminal,  men  who  had  broken  with  the  restrictions  of  civili- 
zation, and  who  sought  lands  where  they  could  be  free  to  do  as 
they  would.  Naturally  the  frontier,  from  Texas  to  the  Ca- 
nadian line  and  even  north  of  it,  was  to  all  such  a  veritable  land 
of  promise. 

It  has  never  been  fully  recognized  in  the  East  that  it  is  to 
this  wave  of  ungoverned  and  ungovernable  men  that  we  owe 
chiefly  the  Indian  troubles  that  were  so  often  unnecessary. 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  77 

The  truth  is,  the  "plain  tribes"  never  had  a  square  deal.  The 
whites  these  Indians  first  came  in  contact  with  were  the  lawless 
element,  the  aftermath  of  war,  men  who  had  learned  in  its 
red  school  a  light  regard  for  life,  and  a  lighter  for  property. 
When  you  admit  the  bravery  and  the  immense  energy  of  this 
class,  you  have  summed  up  their  virtues.  Might  was  right  to 
them;  a  man  took  what  he  could  take,  and  stood  as  best  he  could 
to  defend  it.  The  brutal  motto  they  professed  and  con- 
sistently acted  on  was  "the  only  good  Indian  is  a  dead  Indian." 
They  bested  the  Indian  in  trickery  and  cruelty,  and  some  of  the 
Regular  Army  officers  who  directed  military  operations  against 
the  Indians  in  the  '7o's  were,  it  must  be  confessed,  of  the  same 
mind. 

As  a  result  of  our  inquiries  at  St.  Paul,  we  altered  our  plans 
considerably.  We  determined  to  take  the  train  as  far  as  it 
would  carry  us,  which  was  not  indeed  very  far,  and  then  to 
travel  westward  and  northward,  hoping  to  strike  the  buffalo 
herd  that  was  reported  to  be  some  hundred  and  fifty  miles 
horn  railhead.  Failing  this,  we  would  go  still  farther  north, 
cross  the  Canadian  line,  and  get  somehow  to  Fort  Garry,  the 
headquarters  of  the  Hudson  Bay  Company.  (Fort  Garry  after- 
ward became  the  city  of  Winnipeg.) 

Sauk  Centre,  a  railroad  shanty-town,  was  our  jumping-off 
place;  and  there,  in  early  June,  we  detrained.  Our  quite  in- 
adequate outfit  consisted  of  a  large  wagon,  driven  by  a  retired 
cavalryman  who  was  a  stranger  to  the  country,  a  poor  tent,  the 
best  we  could  get  at  St.  Paul,  a  pair  of  good  horses,  and  a  supply 
of  pork,  hard  tack,  coffee,  and  sugar.  The  whole  thing  was 
absurd;  but  we  were  green,  very  green,  and  everyone  in  St. 
Paul  was  so  taken  up  with  his  own  affairs  that  we  had  been 
obliged  to  go  on  our  uninstructed  way  if  we  were  to  get  off  at 
all. 

At  the  railhead  we  heard  the  usual  silly  talk  about  Indians. 
Out  of  sight  of  the  line  they  were  supposed  to  lurk  everywhere, 
and  no  man's  life  was  safe.  The  Sioux  massacre,  as  it  was 
called,  of  a  few  years  before,  was  fresh  in  mind,  and  though,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  the  marauding  bands  that  had  swept  western 
Minnesota  in  '63  and  '64  had  been  driven  far  with  heavy  loss, 
none  of  the  tellers  of  these  fearsome  tales  believed  it,  and  they 


78  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

made  such  an  impression  on  our  cavalryman  that  there  and 
then  he  proposed  to  give  up  his  job.  At  last  he  reluctantly 
yielded  to  our  persuasion  and  a  promised  "advance,"  and 
without  a  map  and  with  only  one  compass  we  were  actually  off. 

Across  a  gap  of  almost  fifty  years  I  see  again  that  wonderful 
green  world  of  the  western  prairie,  as  yet  untroubled  of  the 
plough.  It  is  mid-June,  and  as  far  as  the  eye  can  see  long 
levels  of  rich  grass  land,  rising  now  and  then  into  slow  waves 
and  scarcely  accented  ridges,  stretched  out  before  me.  Where 
the  soil  is  poorer,  wild  roses  grow  in  short  sweet  tufts  every- 
where, and  countless  flowers  are  there,  many  of  them  new  to 
me.  Oh,  what  a  land  that  prairie  land  was  then !  I  had  read 
of  it,  dreamed  of  it,  but  it  was  wider,  opener,  more  gloriously 
free  than  I  had  dreamed.  The  vigour,  the  breath,  the  beauty 
of  it !  It  stirred  my  blood.  You  felt  you  could  go  anywhere 
and  do  anything. 

Life  was  splendid,  and  you  were  young.  I  never  found  in 
any  poet  a  line  that  reminded  me  of  what  I  felt  that  morning 
till  I  came  across  Francis  Thompson's  "Anthem  of  Earth." 
In  it  he  has  given  a  voice  to  a  young  man's  glory  in  Nature 
when,  full-blooded,  with  all  the  zest  of  youth  in  him,  he  wor- 
ships her.  Later,  surely,  heavily,  her  foot  is  on  his  neck,  and 
youth's  joyous  song  changes  to  a  sigh  of  resignation  and  deep 
thankfulness,  too.  But  golden  boys  and  girls  should  have  their 
day.    How  glad  I  am  I  had  mine! 

In  a  little  joy,  O  Earth,  in  a  little  joy; 

Loving  thy  beauty  in  all  creatures  born  of  thee, 

Children,  and  the  sweet-essenced  body  of  woman; 

Feeling  not  yet  upon  my  neck  thy  foot, 

But  breathing  warm  of  thee  as  infants  breathe 

New  from  their  mother's  morning  bosom. 

/That  lone  land  is  gone,  its  mystery  departed,  its  secrets  all 
surrendered  to  man's  insatiate  searching.  But  in  '69,  the 
thousand  miles  of  prairie  and  forest,  of  lake  and  swamp  that 
stretched  from  the  foot  of  the  Rocky  Mountains  to  the  Red 
River  of  the  North,  lay  empty,  waiting  for  a  resolute  people 
to  conquer  it  and  transform  it  into  a  new  empire.  A  vast, 
various  country,  where  millions  of  buffalo  still  roamed;  where 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  79 

Indians  pitched  at  will  their  smoke-stained  buffalo-skin  tepees; 
where  no  white  man  had  as  yet  come,  save  an  occasional  band 
of  ill-omened  whiskey  traders,  moving  north  from  the  upper 
Missouri,  bringing  murder  and  misery  with  them  wherever 
they  made  their  lawless  round;  and  now  and  then  the  Hudson 
Bay  trader,  crossing  the  Saskatchewan  River  with  his  half- 
breed  bands,  and  their  long  column  of  Red  River  carts,  to  trade 
with  the  Sioux  and  Blackfeet  for  "robes"  and  pemmican. 

That  lone  land  is  gone.  There  were  no  cattle  herds,  no 
ranchmen,  no  cowboys,  and  of  course  no  farmers  in  it  then. 
How  glad  I  am  I  saw  it  all  before  the  great  change  came;  saw  it 
from  Sauk  Centre  to  old  Fort  Garry,  and  from  Fort  Garry  west- 
ward and  southward,  over  the  mountains  and  down  the  Colum- 
bia, its  greatest  river,  to  the  sea. 

I  owe  a  great  deal  to  that  journey.  It  did  more  for  me  than 
I  realized  at  the  time.  I  started  on  it  an  inexperienced  youth, 
having  escaped,  by  a  little,  serious  lung  trouble.  I  was  timid 
and  shy,  not  sure  of  myself  at  all,  though  I  doubt  that  my 
manner  conveyed  this  to  an  unobservant  person.  I  had  not 
conquered  my  own  doubts  of  myself.  They  had  called  me  a 
coward  at  school,  and  I  had  more  than  half  believed  them.  On 
this  journey  I  was  to  be  tested  out  in  others'  sight  and  in  my 
own.  I  was  to  face  what  I  believed  at  the  moment  was  the 
certainty  of  instant  death  without  losing  self-control,  and  so  to 
learn  that  I  really  was  not,  after  all,  a  coward.  If  I  gained 
nothing  else  by  it,  this  experience  made  the  long  journey  well 
worth  while.  But  I  gained  far  more  than  this.  All  my  boyish 
longings  for  the  open,  which  Father's  gift  of  a  gun  when  I  was 
twelve  years  old  had  strengthened,  were  deepened  and  re- 
newed. My  boyhood's  dreams  were  to  come  true.  The  new 
land  I  was  entering  was  to  prove  more  wonderful,  more  beauti- 
ful even,  than  I  had  fancied  it  might  be,  and  it  was  destined  to 
draw  me  to  itself,  to  rest  and  refresh  and  renew  me  during  all 
the  most  arduous  years  that  lay  ahead.  In  its  solitudes  I  was 
to  hide  me,  year  by  year,  while  I  worked  in  New  York;  and  to 
come  back  from  my  own  little  mountain-ranch  in  northern 
Montana,  one  hundred  miles  from  the  nearest  railroad,  a  more 
capable  and  clearer-headed  man. 

All  this  lay  in  the  future.  The  start  we  made  toward  it  was 
as  poor  a  one  as  inexperience  could  well  bring  about.     Of  the 


80  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

simplest  requirements  of  camping  life  we  were  completely 
ignorant.  How  to  pitch  a  tent  so  that  it  could  resist  a  sudden 
downpour  we  did  not  know.  How  to  start  a  fire  with  such 
materials  as  were  at  hand;  how  to  cook  the  simplest  dinner, 
or  sleep  in  a  tormenting  swarm  of  mosquitoes;  how  to  hobble 
our  horses  so  that  the  thongs  of  rawhide  did  not  so  cut  into  the 
fetlock  as  to  lame  them — of  these  and  a  hundred  other  neces- 
sary trifles  we  knew  just  nothing  at  all.  And  when  the  show- 
down came,  our  hired  warrior,  who  claimed  a  long  cavalry 
experience  on  the  frontier,  seemed  to  know  no  more  than  we 
did. 

The  glories  of  that  first  morning,  truth  compels  me  to  con- 
fess, faded  into  the  discomforts  of  a  broiling  afternoon  and  the 
miseries  of  a  first  night,  when  mosquitoes  sang  to  us  and 
feasted  on  us.  Before  sundown  a  sudden  thunderstorm  burst, 
and  warm  rain  fell  in  torrents  for  half  an  hour.  Seeing  the 
approach  of  the  storm,  we  stopped  and  tried  to  get  our  tent  up. 
Nothing  went  right.  The  poles  would  not  fit,  the  ropes  would 
not  draw,  and  of  course  we  chose  the  wrong  sort  of  place  to 
pitch  it  on — a  level  bit  of  fat  prairie  land.  When  at  last  the 
thing  was  standing,  there  was  water  half  an  inch  deep  on  its 
muddy,  trampled  floor. 

I  have  pitched  camp  thousands  of  times  since  then;  when  I 
was  young  doing  it  myself;  later  superintending  the  business 
while  others  did  the  work;  but  never  again  did  I  pass  so  dis- 
couraging a  night  as  the  first  night  on  the  paririe.  The  eve- 
ning fell  calm  and  clear,  and  having  eaten — I  can't  say  dined — 
we  settled  down  to  make  the  best  of  things.  We  had  nothing 
to  sit  on,  no  log  fire  to  warm  our  soaked  clothes  and  bodies  at, 
and,  worst  lack  of  all,  no  mosquito  nets.  Now  I  have  fought 
mosquitoes  in  many  lands,  and  am  in  a  position  to  compare 
authoritatively  our  native  product  with  his  dangerous  and 
persistent  relative  in  Italy  and  in  Africa.  But  there  is  no 
comparison.  I  state  positively  that  the  American  mosquito 
is  more  effective,  is  better  armed,  and  has  a  vigour  of  attack, 
that  no  relative  of  his  possesses!  He  does  not  reign  now  where 
his  rule  was  absolute  long  ago.  His  numbers  are  as  nothing 
compared  to  what  once  they  were.  But  when  I,  poor  ignorant 
boy,  first  dared  to  invade  his  sanctuary,  he  held  in  fee  simple 
during  the  months  of  June  and  July  the  prairie  land  for  his 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  81 

own.  This  first  night  I  am  telling  of  we  simple  mortals  did 
not  know  enough  even  to  build  a  smudge  in  the  door  of  our 
tent;  but  later,  when  I  did  know  how  to  combat  the  pest, 
and  did  have  smudges  lit,  I  have  had  a  tortured  mule  come 
during  the  night  to  the  smudge  smoke  and  stand  in  it  till  its 
slow  living  flame  scorched  and  destroyed  the  leg  sinews  so 
badly  that  we  had  to  shoot  it  in  the  morning. 

In  the  warm  evening  air,  this  June  night,  I  saw  for  the  first 
time  the  cursed  insect  multitudes  actually  rising  like  a  thick 
misty  cloud  from  the  lush  prairie  grass.  I  am  not  exaggerating. 
I  am  using  the  best  simile  I  can  find  to  describe  what  I 
saw. 

And  now  having  described  our  start — I  must  cut  my  story 
down  and  content  myself  with  giving  some  account  of  a  few  of 
the  adventures  we  had  as  we  made  our  lonely  way  from  old 
Fort  Garry,  on  the  Red  River  of  the  North,  to  where,  at  the 
mouth  of  the  Columbia  River,  the  little  town  of  Portland 
stood.  Fort  Garry  was  the  capital  post  of  the  Hudson  Bay 
Company,  from  it  a  few  score  of  hard-bitted  Scotsmen  man- 
aged a  territory  larger  than  the  United  States.  Their  sub- 
jects were  a  few  thousand  half-breeds,  that  sometimes  gave 
them  trouble,  and  many  thousand  Indians,  who  since  they 
were  honestly  treated  and  never  given  any  whiskey,  gave 
them  no  trouble  at  all.  Not  one  mile  of  road,  not  a  telegraph 
line  was  there  then,  from  one  end  to  the  other  of  that  great 
Lone  Land. 

In  the  Company's  magazine  we  found  those  necessary  things 
that  we  couldn't  get  anywhere  else — and  so  at  last  we  were 
ready  as  two  quite  inexperienced  young  fellows  could  well  be 
to  push  our  way  across  the  unmapped  country  we  had  come  so 
far  to  see.  We  had  stout  horses,  good  Red  River  carts  (those 
little  two-wheeled  wooden  affairs,  unbreakable  and  almost 
un-upsettable,  not  a  nail  or  bit  of  iron  in  them,  every  fastening 
made  with  green  raw  buffalo  hide,  shrunk  on)  English  saddles 
bearing  the  name  of  an  excellent  firm,  a  waterproof  tent,  and  a 
sufficient  supply  of  such  provisions  as  the  frugal  habits  of  the 
fur  traders  approved  (no  canned  goods  in  those  days)  to  last 
for  months.  Flour  was  the  most  precious  thing,  the  most 
difficult  to  procure;  for  it  we  paid  twenty-five  cents  a  pound, 
and  our  supply  was  Jimited.     No  wheat  was  raised  in  all  these 


82  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

vast  wheat  lands,  except  in  a  small  and  experimental  way  at 
Fort  Garry  and  Edmonton. 

The  Saskatchewan  River  rises  in  the  Rocky  Mountains,  and, 
as  does  the  Red  River  of  the  North,  flows  into  Lake  Winnipeg. 
Near  Fort  Carlton  the  stream  divides  into  southern  and 
northern  branches.  Both  rise  in  the  mountains,  and  together 
they  water  what  is  to-day  the  fairest  region  of  western  Canada. 
Between  these  rivers  were  the  hunting  grounds  of  the  Blackfeet 
and  the  plain  Crees.  To  south  of  the  south  Saskatchewan, 
close  to  the  mountains,  were  the  Piegans,  and  in  the  foothills, 
and  as  far  as  the  Continental  divide,  the  sheep-eating  Assini- 
boines  kept  all  other  Indians  out. 

This  was  our  land  of  promise,  our  chosen  hunting  ground. 
On  its  wide  plains  multitudes  of  buffalo  grazed;  in  its  hilly 
country  elk,  bear,  the  wild  sheep  and  Rocky  Mountain  goat1 
were  still  so  common  that  the  Assiniboines  lived  chiefly  on 
their  flesh,  and  were  completely  clothed  and  housed  with  their 
skins. 

We  really  had  chosen  better  than  we  knew.  Here  Indians 
were  at  peace  with  the  white  man,  and  had  been  at  peace, 
usually  because  there  was  no  whiskey,  and  the  white  man  dealt 
honestly  with  them,  and  left  their  women  alone. 

We  had  intended  making  Fort  Carlton  on  the  Saskatchewan 
— 509  miles  from  Fort  Garry,  our  starting  point  for  a  long  hunt- 
ing expedition  to  the  southward  and  westward,  but  there  a  panic 
fear  of  the  Blackfoot  Indians  was  at  its  height.  One  of  the 
officers  of  the  Company  having  been  shot  and  dangerously 
wounded  by  some  lurking  "brave" — near  the  "post,"  and  this 
spoiled  our  plan.  We  tried  to  get  reliable  men  to  go  with  us, 
men  to  drive  our  carts  and  a  guide,  who  knew  the  difference 
between  a  Cree  warrior  and  a  Blackfoot  or  a  Sioux,  which 
naturally  we  did  not;  but  no  one  would  go.  We  offered  double 
wages.  It  was  of  no  use.  I  could  see  that  the  Company 
officers  themselves,  instead  of  aiding  us,  were  so  genuinely 
panic-stricken  that  they  could  afford  us  no  help  whatever.  So 
long  as  we  kept  north,  they  said,  and  stuck  to  the  great  trail, 
there  was  little  danger.     If  we  went  south  we  would  certainly 

JThe  goat,  by  the  way,  was  not  a  goat  any  more  than  the  buffalo  was  a  buffalo,  but  following 
the  usual  American  custom  of  misnaming  things,  we  call  the  bison,  buffalo;  and  the  Rocky 
Mountain  antelope,  goat. 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  83 

be  scalped  or  captured,  and  in  either  of  these  eventualities 
there  would  be  trouble  for  them.  So  to  help  us  to  our  destruc- 
tion they  declined. 

This  persistent  timidity  of  our  hosts  began  to  be  a  serious 
nuisance,  and  my  friend  and  I  had  long  consultations  as  to 
plans.  As  we  were  debating  the  future,  the  fort  people  were 
thrown  into  a  still  more  disturbed  state  of  mind  by  the  un- 
announced arrival  of  a  hard-looking  band  of  whiskey  traders 
from  Fort  Benton.  There  were  twelve  of  them,  a  tough  lot, 
led  by  a  Jew,  as  undesirable  a  rascal  as  I  had  ever  seen.  Such 
small  bands  at  that  time  were  not  uncommon,  but  they  very 
seldom  pushed  their  way  across  the  boundary  line  and  into 
the  Blackfoot  country.  I  am  convinced  that  these  had  come 
so  far  simply  to  spy  out  the  land,  and  satisfy  themselves  as  to 
what  could  be  got  in  trade  out  of  the  Indians  thereabouts. 
They  were  unusually  well  armed,  but  had  used  up  all  their 
whiskey,  if  they  had  not  "cached"  it.  Meanwhile,  they  asked 
for  flour  and  pork.  The  fort  people  said  they  could  not  supply 
them.  This  did  not  satisfy  the  visitors,  and  they  looked 
threatening.  The  end  of  it  was,  flour  and  pork  came  from 
somewhere,  and  the  traders,  to  the  immense  relief  of  everybody, 
moved  away.  I  spent  the  best  part  of  two  days  in  their 
company  while  they  hung  round.  It  was  a  new  experience  to 
me.  They  presented  a  type  I  had  never  seen.  No  ties  held 
them  to  the  country,  or  indeed  to  each  other.  All  but  the 
Jew  said  they  had  been  soldiers  in  the  great  war,  some  on  one 
side,  some  on  the  other.  Criminals,  I  fancy,  all  of  them. 
Their  leader  (why  he  was  a  leader  I  could  not  make  out) 
seemed  to  take  a  fancy  to  me.  He  said  he  "had  a  hard  gang  to 
control;  that  he  would  go  back  to  honest  life  soon  as  he  could 
reach  the  Missouri.  Two  of  his  band  he  knew  intended  to 
murder  him,  and  get  the  gold  he  carried  in  a  heavy  belt.  They 
had  pushed  their  way  right  through  the  Blackfoot  country,  and 
had  had  no  trouble  with  the  tribe.  They  would  not  have  come 
so  far  north  had  it  not  been  reported  at  Benton  that  there  was 
good  placer  mining  on  the  Saskatchewan.  They  had  pros- 
pected on  the  south  branch,  but  had  found  nothing  worth 
while." 

He  had  come  through  much  of  the  country  we  hoped  to  visit 
and  hunt  in,  and  his  first-hand  knowledge  was  of  good  value. 


84  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

His  advice  was — "get  into  a  large  village  of  plain  Indians  and 
stay  in  it.  You  run  some  risk  getting  in,  on  account  of  the 
irresponsible  small  war  parties,  composed  of  undisciplined 
young  warriors  who  are  out  on  their  own,  hoping  to  steal  a 
horse  or  get  a  scalp,  and  so  gain  credit  for  bravery.  These 
fellows  are  not  likely  to  kill  you,  but  they  might  put  you  afoot. 
You  face  the  same  risks  getting  out  of  the  large  camps  as  you  do 
getting  in;  so  stay  in  the  big  camp,  and  hunt  with  its  riders. 
They  are  hospitable,  you  can  leave  your  tent  unguarded,  and 
if  you  give  them  a  present  when  you  go  away,  all  will  go 
well." 

Every  word  of  this  we  proved  to  be  true. 

As  to  his  own  plans,  he  was  frank.  He  evidently  trusted  me. 
"There  are  two  of  these  fellows  who  will  get  me  if  I  don't  get 
them  first.  The  trouble  is,  I  must  make  the  rest  of  the  gang 
understand  that  these  two  are  ready  to  commit  murder,  or  they 
will  not  stand  for  my  killing  them."  So  there  on  the  wide  beau- 
tiful plain  I  had  my  first  real  experience  of  what  our  poor  hu- 
man nature  may  come  to  when  it  recognizes  no  law  higher  or 
holier  than  that  of  its  own  cunning — when  man  thinks  and  acts 
for  himself,  and  for  himself  alone. 

This  meeting  with  the  whiskey  trader  had  a  strange  sequel. 
In  the  spring  of  next  year,  as  I  sat  in  the  public  hall  of  a 
hotel  in  New  Orleans,  I  noticed  a  man  whom  I  did  not  immedi- 
ately recognize  staring  at  me.  He  came  up  and,  holding  out  his 
hand,  named  himself.     Still  I  could  recall  nothing. 

"Why,  don't  you  remember  the  whiskey  trader  and  his  band 
on  the  Saskatchewan?" 

"How  did  your  adventure  end?"    I  asked. 

"Well,  I  got  back  to  Benton  with  my  belt  and  my  life,  and  I 
am  settled  down  here  in  business.  No  more  whiskey  trading 
for  me." 

"What  about  those  two  men  that  you  said  meant  to  get 
you?" 

"Well,  I  got  them.  They  gave  themselves  away  by  trying  to 
have  another  fellow,  a  friend  of  mine,  join  them  in  putting 
me  away,  and  he  came  and  warned  me.  Then  I  had  what  I 
wanted — another  witness  to  their  plot.  And  so  we  outplotted 
them." 

"Had  you  a  shooting  scrape?"  said  I. 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  85 

"Oh,  no,  no  use  in  that;  I  and  my  friend  lay  for  them  by  the 
water  one  evening,  and  they  had  no  time  to  'draw.'  " 

The  longest  lane  has  a  turning^and  at  Pitt,  the  next  post  to 
Carlton,  on  the  Saskatchewan,  our  luck  took  a  turn.  The  officer 
in  charge  proved  a  mighty  good  fellow.  He  had  traded  with 
the  Blackfeet  for  years.  Pitt  was  a  Blackfoot  post,  and  the 
officer  confirmed  what  my  whiskey-trading  friends  had  told 
me — that  if  we  could  but  gain  the  shelter  of  any  large  camp  of 
plain  Indians,  whether  they  were  Crees  or  Blackfeet,  we  would 
be  comparatively  safe.  Promiscuous  killing  and  horse  stealing 
were  going  on  as  usual;  they  never  stopped.  But  that  was  the 
work  of  small  bands  of  young  braves  who  were  out  on  their 
"own."  They  were  a  sort  of  unauthorized,  unorthodox 
highwaymen,  always  troublesome  and  dangerous,  but  neither 
Crees  nor  Blackfeet  were  at  war  with  the  white  man;  and  so  if 
we  were  scalped  or  put  afoot,  it  would  be  owing  to  a  sort  ot 
tribal  mistake. 

I  remember  well  our  arrival  at  Fort  Pitt.  That  afternoon 
a  sudden  thunderstorm  blew  up,  and  a  cold  rain  drenched  one 
to  the  skin  in  a  few  moments.  The  men  wanted  to  camp. 
We  were  still  sixteen  miles  from  the  fort,  they  said,  and  the 
downpour  was  tremendous.  The  poor,  unshod  ponies  slipped 
and  floundered  in  the  black  sticky  mud.  We  bade  them  do 
as  they  wished,  but  we  determined  to  make  the  fort  that  night. 

I  am  rather  proud  of  those  last  sixteen  miles.  We  had 
already  ridden  and  marched  over  thirty,  but  we  tightened  our 
belts  and  ran  that  last  lap  into  Pitt  against  the  downpour. 
We  were  unexpected,  but  they  gave  us  a  right  hearty  welcome, 
and  a  supper — oh,  such  a  supper !  A  great  wooden  bowl  of  new 
potatoes,  and  all  we  could  eat  of  roast  buffalo  hump,  the  best, 
the  very  best  meat  any  man  ever  put  his  teeth  into.  I  say  the 
best  advisedly.  I  have  tried  them  all,  from  elephant  foot  to 
moose  mouffle.  Some  of  them  good,  the  far  greater  part  very 
disappointing.  But  fresh  juicy  buffalo  hump,  cut  from  a  young 
cow,  was  something  to  remember  as  long  as  you  lived.  Before 
a  big  log  fire  we  dried  out,  and  life  seemed  pretty  good  to  us 
that  first  night  at  Fort  Pitt. 

Our  host,  it  was  easy  to  see,  loved  the  country,  and  was  not 
scared  to  death  of  the  Indians  he  was  there  to  trade  with.  He 
put  himself  in  our  place  at  once;  he  realized  we  had  come  a 


86  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

long  way  in  order  to  do  a  certain  thing,  and  he  said  that  all  that 
in  him  lay  to  aid  us  he  would  do. 

Next  morning  men  were  sent  to  drive  in  the  Company's 
horse  herd.  The  plains  Indians  were  well  mounted  in  those 
days,  and  as  Fort  Pitt  was  their  trading  post,  the  Company's 
herd  was  an  unusually  fine  lot.  We  needed  a  couple  of  buffalo 
runners  as  the  horses  we  were  riding  were  not  fitted  for  the  chase. 
We  tested  a  number  for  pace,  and  bought  his  two  ponies  at  a 
reasonable  rate.  The  "breed"  who  rode  them  for  our  inspec- 
tion was  the  guide  chosen  to  lead  us,  and  one  proof  of  his  capacity 
he  gave  then  and  there.  He  was  a  finished  horseman.  Before 
we  left  the  post  news  came  of  some  fighting  on  the  plains  be- 
tween Cree  and  Blackfoot,  but  as  we  had  never  ceased  to  hear  of 
such  things  since  we  had  left  Red  River  we  were  not  impressed. 
One  Blackfoot  leader,  it  was  reported,  was  on  the  warpath  near 
the  Battle  River,  some  hundred  miles  to  the  south  of  us.  He 
was  said  to  wear  a  scarlet  robe. 

So  at  last,  after  long  waiting,  much  planning,  and  many 
disappointments,  we  turned  resolutely  away  from  beaten  trails, 
and  faced  due  south  toward  the  wide  plain-land  of  the  Indian 
and  the  buffalo.  There  was  risk  in  the  venture,  for  we  were 
only  a  small  party,  just  five,  and  of  course  were  not  armed 
"for  any  fighting."  Any  war  party  could,  if  they  wished, 
take  our  scalps  or  put  us  "  afoot."  We  had  made  up  our  minds 
that  under  no  circumstances  would  we  shed  blood.  We  were 
trespassers  on  other  people's  lands;  and  the  rightful  owners, 
though  savage  in  their  cruelty  to  one  another,  had  not,  so  far 
as  we  could  learn,  shown  causeless  hostility  to  the  whites. 
They  had  been  systematically  swindled,  and  sometimes  slaught- 
ered, and  the  wrong  was  on  the  white  man's  side,  not  on 
the  red  man's.  Of  so  much  we  were  satisfied,  and  so  if  we  went 
among  them  we  went  as  friends  not  as  aggressors.  The 
strong  point  in  our  favour  was  that  we  were  coming  to  them 
from  the  Saskatchewan,  the  country  of  the  "great  white 
Queen,"  not  from  the  Missouri,  the  country  of  the  "Long 
Knives"  (i.e.,  bayonets). 

As  we  journeyed  south,  there  was  more  plain,  less  wood  and 
less  water,  and  wide  stretches  of  sandy  soil.  For  the  first  time 
herds  of  antelope  appeared,  and  there  were  more  wolves.  They 
would  sit  on  the  low  hilltops  round  our  fire,  and  call  to  each 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  87 

other  all  night  long,  a  wild,  weird  song.  When  we  had  made  a 
hundred  miles  or  more  I  noticed  that  our  men  were  growing 
nervous.  "  The  herd  has  gone  out  of  the  land,"  they  said.  "  It 
is  useless  to  follow  them  longer.  We  are  going  right  into  the 
Blackfoot  country,  and  never  shall  any  of  us  see  wife  or  child 
or  friend  again." 

At  one  hundred  and  fifty  miles  from  the  fort  we  had  a  little 
mutiny.  They  would  turn  back,  and  our  gallant  guide  was 
leader  in  the  "talk".  It  was  heart-breaking  work  to  have  to 
travel  with  such  men,  but  no  better  were  to  be  had.  "Yes, 
go  back,  but  you  shall  go  afoot;  and  never  see  a  cent  of  wages. 
We  will  go  on,  if  we  have  to  drive  our  own  carts,  and  all  the 
women  will  laugh  at  you,  as  you  come  sneaking  into  the  fort." 
So  we  cowed  them,  and  that  night  as  we  sat  round  our  little 
fire,  I  heard  for  the  first  time  a  strange,  low,  rumbling  sort  of 
sound,  like  very  faint  thunder  far  away.  Our  hunter  started, 
and  put  his  ear  to  the  ground.  "The  buffalo  are  near,"  he  said, 
"listen  to  them  marching."  And  so  it  was — the  distant 
thunder  of  the  hoofs  of  the  great  herd.  Excitement,  expec- 
tancy, banished  for  the  time  being  fear.  The  spirit  of  the  chase 
arose  in  the  breasts  of  even  the  most  cowardly,  and  no  one  now 
wanted  to  turn  back. 

Next  morning  we  broke  camp  early,  our  guide  riding  some 
distance  ahead.  We  were  in  open  plain.  Everything  looked 
quite  flat,  but  actually  the  surface  of  the  prairie  had  great 
billowy  swells  in  it.  It  was  as  though  an  Atlantic  Sea,  after 
heavy  storm,  had  passed  in  an  instant  into  a  sea  of  grass.  As 
you  rode,  you  moved  up  and  down  over  an  endless  succession 
of  gentle  slopes;  three  or  four  summits  and  twice  as  many 
declivities  you  would  pass  in  a  mile.  It  seemed  as  though  you 
could  see  all  round  you,  in  every  direction,  that  a  surprise  was 
impossible;  as  a  fact,  a  band  of  men  and  horses  might  be  within 
half  a  mile  of  you,  and  be  as  completely  hidden  as  though  you 
were  in  a  land  of  brush. 

As  I  was  mounting  one  of  the  great  prairie  waves,  what 
should  I  see  but  our  hunter  riding  furiously  toward  us.  As  he 
dashed  up,"  We  are  lost,"  he  gasped,"  We  are  surrounded  by  the 
Blackfeet.  Red  Robe  is  leading  them."  What  followed  was 
the  work  not  of  minutes  but  of  seconds.  The  cowardly  rascal 
dashed  by  me,  cut  with  a  slashing  blow  of  his  knife  the  leather 


88  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

lariat  by  which  the  pony  I  had  bought  a  few  days  before  was 
tied  to  the  rear  of  one  of  our  carts,  cast  his  own  inferior  beast 
free,  and  leaping  on  the  back  of  mine,  was  off  like  the  wind.  As 
I  watched  him  go  there  was  no  mistake  at  least  about  his 
qualities  as  a  rider.  Under  him  that  little  horse  fairly  flew. 
Our  two  half-breed  Crees  were  now  speechless,  quite  incapable 
of  hearing  or  understanding  any  order.  We  two  rode  quickly 
to  the  top  of  the  rise  of  ground  over  which  our  departed  warrior 
had  rushed  to  us.  And  sure  enough,  there  were  the  Blackfeet, 
more  than  two  hundred  of  them,  led  by  an  Indian  in  a  red  robe 
riding  a  fine  horse.  They  had  evidently  seen  us  before  our 
outrider  spotted  them,  for  they  moved  on  us  in  a  long  line, 
curving  like  a  horseshoe.  The  sides  of  the  horseshoe,  as  I 
looked  round  over  my  shoulder,  were  closing  fast  on  our 
valorous  guide,  but  I  saw  him,  riding  for  dear  life,  get  through 
before  they  closed,  pursued  by  a  bunch  of  riders  seemingly  as 
well  mounted  as  he  was.  But  the  long  line  closed  in  on  us,  the 
riders  drawing  near  to  one  another  as  they  came.  "Let's  turn 
the  carts  up,  make  a  breastwork  out  of  them.  Behind  them 
we  can  stand  the  Indians  off  and  make  a  parley.  It  is  all  we 
can  do."  We  rushed  back  to  our  men.  I  see  those  poor, 
craven  fellows  now,  kneeling  behind  the  little  upturned  carts, 
stammering  "Aves,"  actually  paralyzed  with  terror,  their 
faces  distorted,  the  saliva  dribbling  from  the  corners  of  their 
half-open  mouths.  And  still  the  silent  line  of  riders  closed 
in.  I  noticed  specially  a  young  warrior  who  rode  some  yards 
ahead  of  the  Indian  in  the  red  robe.  Suddenly  a  wild  idea 
came  to  me.  "I'll  grab  that  man,"  I  said  to  H.  "I'll  drag 
him  here.  Behind  him,  we'll  make  a  parley."  "All  right," 
said  H.,  cocking  at  last  his  double-barrel  twelve-bore,  and  I 
fear  forgetting  all  about  our  most  honest  determination  not  to 
shed  blood.  "The  first  man  that  shoots  at  you  I'll  kill."  I 
was  outside  the  carts.  I  pushed  my  horse  at  foot-pace  toward 
the  man  who  at  the  same  pace  came  toward  me.  As  I  closed 
with  him  he  did  not  raise  his  gun — it  lay  in  the  hollow  of  his 
arm,  as  did  mine — but  those  others  near  me  did,  and  as  I  sat 
on  my  horse,  I  looked  right  down  their  muzzles,  at  a  few  yards 
off.  I  remember  I  straightened  up  a  bit  on  my  pony,  for  I  was 
sure  this  was  the  end.  As  I  reached  my  man,  I  suddenly  flung 
my  right  arm  round  his  neck,  and  with  all  my  strength  wrench- 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  89 

ing  him  from  the  saddle,  I  had  him  up  against  our  carts  in  an 
instant.  As  he  and  I  lurched  against  the  carts,  he  gurgled 
something.  I  did  not  know  what  he  said,  but  the  effect  of 
that  first  word  spoken  to  me  in  an  unknown  tongue!  It  was 
magical!  The  revulsion  from  terror  to  ecstasy!  My  men 
leaped  to  their  feet,  shouting,  singing,  crying,  cursing  by  turns. 
They  fell  to  kissing  each  other;  made  a  grab  at  me.  Then  they 
rushed  out  among  the  stolid  Indians  standing  round  us  and 
tried  to  kiss  them.  These  were  friends,  not  enemies.  Crees, 
not  Blackfeet.     My  captive  had  spoken  to  them  in  Cree. 

My  own  feelings  I  recall  distinctly.  I  still  sat  my  horse, 
but  I  wanted  to  dismount  and  pray.  Then  I  seemed  to  see 
more  in  the  things  around  me  than  I  had  ever  seen.  The  grass 
never  looked  so  green,  nor  the  sky  so  blue,  nor  the  world  so 
lovely.  I  was  alive,  and  what  an  immeasurable  joy  it  was  to  be 
alive  and  not  dead — and — I  would  see  Mother  again — hers  was 
the  image  that  came  to  me  on  the  instant  that  day.  Then,  too, 
I  felt  within  me  a  sense  of  manhood  I  had  never  known  before. 
I  had  looked  down  the  muzzles  of  those  guns,  at  a  few  yards  off, 
and  had  sat  straight  on  my  horse  as  I  rode  into  them.  I  was 
not  a  coward,  after  all.  The  boys  in  Dundalk  school  had  said 
I  was  a  coward,  because  I  had  refused  to  hit  the  boy  back  who 
had  slapped  my  face,  and  I  had  half  believed  they  were  right. 
Now,  with  a  deep  sense  of  satisfaction  that  thrilled  me  through 
and  through,  I  knew  I  was  not  a  coward,  after  all.  It  is  a 
wonderful  and  potent  thing  to  feel  a  new  sense  of  manhood. 

The  Indians  that  now  surrounded  us  were  the  warriors  from 
a  large  hunting  camp,  pitched  in  a  hollow  of  the  prairie  near  by. 
They  had  spotted  us  the  evening  before;  they  suspected  we  had 
come  from  Fort  Pitt,  but  as  they  were  not  sure,  they  deter- 
mined not  to  take  a  chance,  as,  if  we  went  farther  out  on  the 
plains,  the  Blackfeet  might  capture  us,  and  they  much  pre- 
ferred that  we,  our  rifles  and  resources,  should  be  lodged  for 
the  time  being  in  a  Cree,  rather  than  in  a  Blackfoot,  camp. 
As  to  the  Red  Robe,  which  had  quenched  in  our  valorous  guide 
the  last  gleam  of  hope,  its  present  wearer  had  lately  shot  in  a 
skirmish  the  Blackfoot  who  owned  it,  and  the  Cree  now  flaunted 
his  victory  whenever  he  rode  forth. 

We  had  our  cart  men  ask  them  for  news  of  our  fleeing  guide. 
"The  young  men  will  bring  him  in  before  evening.     He  rode 


90  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

a  fast  pony."  (So  he  did;  my  intended  buffalo  runner.)  "But 
some  of  them  are  well  mounted,  too,  and  they  will  ride  him 
down,  perhaps  fire  a  shot  or  two  to  make  him  stop."  And  in 
the  evening  the  young  men  did  bring  the  crestfallen  scamp 
in.  He  had  surely  suffered  the  pains  of  hell;  Death  had  ridden, 
as  he  believed,  closer  and  closer  at  his  heels  for  many  a  mile, 
and  he  never  stopped  till  my  unfortunate  pony  gave  out.  I 
confess  I  would  dearly  have  liked  to  thrash  that  thieving 
coward  within  an  inch  of  his  life,  as  he  stood  quaking  before  me. 
He  had  deserted  his  charge,  he  had  stolen  what  he  believed  was 
my  only  chance  of  escaping  death,  in  an  effort  to  save  his  own 
hide — but — well!  The  experience  of  a  few  hours  before  was 
fresh  within  me.  It  was  not  a  time  to  give  way  to  anger,  even 
anger  that  was  just. 

The  Indians  were  evidently  satisfied  with  the  day's  work. 
They  proposed  that  we  ride  at  once  to  their  camp.  The 
buffalo  were  quite  near,  and  in  great  numbers  they  told  us;  we 
should  hunt  with  them  just  as  long  as  we  had  a  mind  to;  they 
would  herd  our  ponies  with  their  own,  and  there  were  no  bands 
of  the  enemy  anywhere  in  the  neighbourhood  strong  enough 
to  attack  their  lodge.  All  of  which  seemed,  after  our  many 
disappointments,  too  good  news  to  be  true. 

Things  turned  out  as  those  poor  Indians  promised,  and  while 
we  were  with  them  we  had  a  rare  good  time.  A  few  miles'  riding 
brought  us  suddenly  to  the  camp.  There  was  no  sign  of  it  till 
you  rode  into  it.  We  mounted  one  of  the  prairie  waves  I  have 
spoken  of  and,  at  our  feet,  lay  not  less  than  one  hundred  lodges. 
They  were  of  a  pleasant  yellow-white  tone  of  colour,  surely  as 
picturesque  a  form  of  habitation  as  has  ever  been  invented  by 
civilized  man. 

The  buffalo  skins  that  covered  the  long  "lodge  poles"  were 
tanned  white.  The  skins,  stretched  stiffly  on  the  ground, 
were  softened  by  endless  rubbing.  The  women  used  marrow-fat 
on  them  till  they  were  flexible  as  buckskin,  and  something  in  the 
process  those  toiling  women  used  gave  all  the  skins  they 
tanned,  deer  and  elk  skins  as  well  as  buffalo,  a  peculiar  Indian 
smell  that  never  left  them — a  very  nice  smell.  I  have  still  by 
me  a  war  robe  I  traded  from  these  Crees,  a  rarity  to-day.  It 
is  made  of  two  antelope  skins,  porcupine  quill  work  on  its 
breast  and  back,  and  six  scalps  pendent  from  the  shoulders 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  91 

and  arms.  That  far-away  Indian  smell  hangs  round  it  still, 
the  smell  of  the  wild  man  at  his  best,  the  smell  of  a  past  race,  a 
past  time.  It  seems  to  me  to  be  a  gentlemanly  sort  of  smell. 
I  have  no  other  word  to  describe  it,  and  the  poor,  brave, 
hospitable  fellow  who  traded  it  to  me,  what  of  him  ?  He  and 
his  band  died  in  the  terrible  epidemic  of  smallpox  that  de- 
stroyed whole  tribes  in  the  West,  the  year  after  I  parted  from 
them. 

I  am  tempted  to  give  more  space  than  I  should,  in  my  story, 
to  the  things  I  saw  and  the  lessons  I  learned  in  this  little  town 
of  a  vanishing  race.  I  am  glad  that  our  perseverance  at  last 
brought  us  to  it,  and  brought  us  to  it  only  just  in  time,  for  its 
sad  end  was  very  near.  The  plain  Crees  are  gone.  Three 
thousand  of  them  died  in  one  winter  of  the  smallpox.  Of  the 
Blackfeet,  their  hereditary  foes,  only  a  remnant  is  left.  (It 
is  settled  at  last  on  a  good  reservation  in  northern  Montana, 
and  there  I  visited  it  in  1903.  The  Indians  are  doing  well.) 
Before  the  chance  of  settlement  was  offered  it,  the  Blackfoot 
tribe  was  first  swept  by  smallpox,  and,  while  the  epidemic  was 

ravaging  its  lodges,   Colonel — ,  with  American   troops, 

without  warning  or  cause  or  excuse,  in  a  night  attack,  in  mid- 
winter, shot  down  its  men,  women,  and  children,  sick  and  well, 
in  the  tepees. 

So  the  Blackfeet  and  their  allies  were  driven  on  the  warpath, 
and  between  the  smallpox  and  incessant  conflict  with  the  wave 
of  immigration  then  flowing  westward,  only  a  remnant  sur- 
vived. They  were  not  bad  Indians;  they  never  fought  the 
white  man  till  they  had  to. 

In  the  Cree  camp  we  had  the  place  of  honour  next  the 
Chief's  tepee.  The  camp  was  well  kept  and  clean,  there  was 
good  order  throughout.  There  was  no  whiskey  and  no  quarrel- 
ling. Everyone  went  about  his  own  business,  and  except  for  a 
few  fellows  who  pestered  us  at  first  by  begging,  we  were  per- 
mitted to  go  about  ours.  The  braves  rose  before  sun-up  to 
do  their  hunting,  once  or  twice  a  week,  killing  as  many  buffalo 
as  the  women  could  take  care  of  and  no  more;  and  the  prepa- 
ration of  robes,  dried  meat,  and  pemmican  went  on  daily  in  a 
businesslike  way.  We  were  welcomed  everywhere,  and  might 
walk  into  any  of  the  tepees  anytime  of  the  day  or  night;  naturally 
they  claimed  the  same  privilege  from  us,  and  at  times  this  was 


92  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

awkward,  as  their  visits  were  inclined  to  be  long.     But  we  got 
on  well  together  and  had  nothing  stolen  during  our  stay. 

The  day  after  our  arrival  the  war  chief  of  the  camp,  a  fine, 
upstanding  Indian  of  about  forty,  came  to  our  tent  and  in- 
vited us  to  join  him  and  his  braves  next  morning,  before  sun-up, 
outside  the  camp.  So,  at  last,  my  boyhood's  dream  had  come 
true,  and  out  on  the  wide  prairie-land,  side  by  side  with  the 
red  Indian,  I  was  to  join  in  the  chase  that  was  unlike  any 
other  hunting  in  the  wide  world. 

That  I  was  to  ride  with  a  vanishing  race,  in  pursuit  of  a 
vanishing  game,  and  to  be  present  at  the  closing  scene  in  a 
double  tragedy,  I  did  not  realize  then. 

A  splendid  sun-rise  greeted  the  company  as  we  gathered 
round  our  leader  on  the  green  hill-crest  beyond  the  quiet 
tepees.  Among  these  a  few  women  were  moving  about,  and 
here  and  there  the  blue  smoke  of  little  morning  fires  rose,  but 
everything  was  very  still.  Noise  carried  far  in  the  quiet  morn- 
ing, and  the  herd  was  near.  We  must  have  numbered  two 
hundred  men,  well  mounted.  Some  few  were  armed  with  the 
bow,  though  the  great  majority  carried  the  usual  Hudson  Bay 
smooth-bore  flint-lock  musket,  the  identical  weapon  the 
Company  had  traded  to  all  its  Indians  for  more  than  one  hun- 
dred years.  The  wood  Indian  preferred  it  with  a  long  barrel, 
this  made  for  accuracy.  But  the  plain  Indian  generally 
sawed  off  a  couple  of  feet  from  the  barrel,  in  this  way  making 
the  weapon  handier  for  work  on  horseback.  Accuracy  of  fire 
was  in  his  case  immaterial,  for  his  admirably  trained  "runner" 
carried  him  with  a  rush  up  on  the  right  side  of  the  lumbering 
game,  and  leaning  over,  at  a  few  feet  off,  he  shot  into  it,  holding 
the  short  gun  out  at  the  length  of  his  arms,  never  resting  the  butt 
against  his  shoulder.  This  required  him  to  attack  from  the 
right  side,  and  it  was  wonderful  to  see  how,  amid  the  smoke  and 
dust,  the  shouting  and  wild  confusion  of  yelling  men  and 
stampeded  buffalo,  those  clever  ponies,  no  rein  to  guide  them — 
for  a  lariat  looped  over  the  under  jaw  and  lying  across  the  neck 
was  their  only  bridle — never  mistook  their  way,  and  never 
failed  to  carry  the  rider  just  where  he  wanted  to  be. 

As  the  rising  sun  shone  on  our  company  it  was  a  thrilling 
sight.  The  bronzed  riders  were  naked,  stripped  to  the  "  breech 
clout,"  and  they  sat  their  bare-backed  horses,  not  as  I  had 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  93 

seen  Indians  sit  when  travelling,  perched  on  a  high  saddle  with 
short  stirrups,  the  knees  drawn  up;  but  here  wild  men  sat  wild 
horses,  each  well  becoming  the  other,  and  the  effect  was  of 
grace  and  beauty  and  speed — like  the  riders  on  the  Parthenon 
frieze,  they  looked  to  me. 

Our  leader  waved  an  arm,  and  the  company  spread  out  in  a 
long  line  on  either  side  of  him.  He  wore  a  war  bonnet  of  eagle 
feathers  and  a  fine  scalp  robe;  he  directed  our  movements  but 
did  not  join  in  the  charge;  and  so  we  moved  away  to  find  the 
herd.  We  had  not  far  to  go.  In  less  than  an  hour's  riding 
scattered  bulls  on  its  outskirts  came  in  sight.  Our  long  line 
moved  quietly  on  at  a  foot's  pace.  We  were  to  get  as  near  as 
possible  before  making  our  rush.  We  must  have  been  within 
a  quarter  of  a  mile  of  them  before  the  bulls  saw  us  and  began 
to  toss  their  great  shaggy  heads  and  stamp  the  ground.  Nearer 
drew  our  line;  and  at  last  they  wheeled  and,  at  a  lumbering 
gallop,  fell  back  on  the  great  masses  of  the  herd,  which  we  now 
saw  stretching  to  right  and  left  of  us  and  beyond,  mile  after 
mile,  in  countless  thousands.  Now  our  pace  was  a  trot,  and 
moving  in  bunches  and  columns,  slowly  at  first,  the  buffalo 
began  streaming  away.  We  were  within  three  hundred  yards 
of  them.  Now  our  chief  put  his  hand  to  his  face,  out  rang  his 
war  yell,  and  we  were  off.  The  riding  was  good,  the  ground 
level  but  full  of  badger  holes,  and  the  dust  churned  up  by  the 
herd  blew  back  in  our  faces,  half  blinding  us.  But  it  seemed 
to  me  that  our  first  furious  rush  had  carried  us  in  a  few  minutes 
almost  on  top  of  the  shaggy  throng.  ( 

I  was  urging  my  runner  forward  for  all  I  was  worth,  when  a 
man  shot  by  me,  and  as  he  did,  his  pony  put  its  foot  in  a  badger 
hole  and  fell  in  a  heap;  the  rider,  striking  on  head  and  shoulders, 
lay  as  completely  knocked  out  as  his  mount.  I  could  just 
make  out  my  runaway  half-breed  hunter,  and  I  cannot  say  I 
was  sorry  for  him. 

And  now  all  was  confusion,  Indians  yelling  like  madmen, 
riding  in  every  direction,  buffaloes  falling,  some  staggering  and 
wounded,  some  standing  at  bay,  but  the  masses  of  them 
steadily  streaming  away  at  a  pace  that  was  much  faster  than  it 
looked.  Any  fairly  fast  horse  could  get  within  fifty  yards  of 
their  waving  tails,  but  to  win  these  last  fifty  needed  a  turn  of 
speed  that  an  ordinary  horse  was  not  capable  of,  and  I  found  to 


94  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

my  dismay  that  I  could  not  get  it  out  of  my  little  pony.  He 
carried  me  up  to  the  herd,  and  kept  me  there.  Scores  of  great 
lumbering  bodies  showed  through  the  dust  cloud  only  a  few 
yards  ahead  of  me,  but  alongside  of  them  I  could  not  get.  If 
I  quickened  my  gallop,  so  did  they.  The  pace  did  not  slacken ; 
they  were  going  as  fast  as  they  could,  and  so  was  I;  but  it 
seemed  to  me  in  my  despair  that  at  this  rate  I  might  follow 
them  to  Mexico  before  I  shot  one.  My  pony  had  a  good 
record.  Many  buffalo  had  been  killed  from  his  back,  but  the 
trouble  was  he  had  been  ridden  to  a  standstill  two  days  before, 
and  my  long  body  and  fourteen-pound  rifle  were,  in  combi- 
nation, too  much  for  any  fourteen-two  Indian  pony.  But  one 
lives  and  learns !  My  fine  double  Rigby,  too,  gave  me  trouble. 
On  a  swerving  horse  that  is  intent  on  picking  its  way  at  a 
gallop  among  deep  open  badger  holes  that  it  could  not  see  till 
it  was  within  a  horse's  length  of  them,  to  carry  fourteen  pounds 
of  wood  and  metal  in  your  right  hand  does  not  conduce  to 
comfortable  riding.  And  when  you  have  to  keep  it  up  for 
several  miles! — well,  even  a  tough  lad  and  a  tough  pony  find 
themselves  at  last  played  out.  That  was  precisely  the  fate 
that,  under  the  circumstances,  inevitably  was  bound  to  over- 
take me  on  the  eventful  occasion  of  my  first  run  with  the 
plain  Crees. 

Disappointed  I  certainly  was,  when  we  both,  my  pony  and 
I,  came  to  a  standstill  at  the  foot  of  a  wave  hill  in  the  prairie 
steeper  than  usual.  His  head  hung  low,  and  I  was  dead  beat. 
Where  I  was  I  had  no  idea,  nor  where  the  Indians  were,  nor  in 
what  direction  camp  lay.  The  buffalo  seemed  to  have  settled 
into  long  travelling  columns1  (as  I  have  noticed  wild  game 
often  does  in  plain  country),  and  in  great  numbers  were  passing 
to  right  and  left  of  me.  Though  I  had  not  been  able  to  get 
pace  enough  out  of  my  pony  to  ride  into  the  band  I  had  pur- 
sued, I  had  evidently  out-distanced  and  ridden  far  ahead  of 
these  many  hundreds  of  the  herd  who  now  were  streaming  by. 
The  day  was  not  yet  lost.  Here  was  my  chance,  and  I  took  it. 
A  fine  bull  was  lumbering  along  not  more  than  one  hundred 
yards  away.  I  sat  down,  rested  each  elbow  on  each  knee,  and 
took  aim.     My  hand  was  shaking,  my  eyes  were  full  of  dust 

JThe  gnu  antelope  on  the  African  veldt  look  like  smaller  buffalo,  and  travel  as  the  buffalo 
did,  in  long  columns. 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  95 

and  sweat,  but  I  did  the  best  I  could,  and  I  heard  with  infinite 
relief  my  big  bullet  "thud"  as  it  struck  him.  Buffalo  were  not 
hard  to  kill.  An  ounce  and  a  quarter  of  lead,  with  six  drams  of 
good  powder  behind  it,  were  too  much  for  any  bull,  and  so  my 
first  buffalo  went  the  way  of  all  flesh  very  satisfactorily.  I  cut 
off  his  tail,  and,  first  loosening  my  spent  pony's  girth,  sat  me 
down  to  rest.  I  have  often  wondered  since  how  we  were  so 
foolish  as  to  venture  out  on  those  unmarked,  endless  plains 
without  any  method  of  guidance  whatever,  save  what  could  be 
had  from  undependable  and  cowardly  half-breeds.  Maps 
there  were  none,  but  we  should  have  provided  ourselves  with  a 
compass,  and  should  have  taken  a  few  very  necessary  lessons 
in  reading  it  and  marching  by  it.  There  was  I,  now  absolutely 
in  the  dark  as  to  where  I  had  come  from,  and  where  I  should 
go  to.  The  sky  was  clear,  and  the  sun  gave  me  the  points  of 
the  compass.  Fort  Pitt  was  north,  of  course,  some  one  hundred 
and  fifty  miles  away.  But  where  was  the  well-hidden  Cree 
camp?  To  attempt  back-tracking  was  useless,  as  for  miles 
around  innumerable  bands  of  buffalo,  fleeing  in  all  directions, 
had  stamped  the  prairie  into  dust.  After  an  hour,  when  my 
pony  had  rested  and  nibbled  some  grass,  I  mounted  and,  feeling 
rather  sober,  started  to  ride  north.  I  rode  up  and  down  prairie 
swells  for  many  miles,  it  seemed  to  me,  and  never  saw  a  soul. 
How  was  it  possible  that  I  had  gotten  so  far  away  from  every 
one  of  those  two  hundred  Indian  friends  of  mine,  with  whom  I 
had  ridden  so  short  a  time  ago?  The  buffalo  country  seemed 
to  me  the  loneliest  country  that  ever  a  man  rode  in.  I  was  still 
pushing  on  slowly  when  close  to  me,  round  a  low  shoulder  of 
ground,  came  a  squaw,  driving  a  traveaux  laden  with  fresh 
buffalo  meat.  I  had  not  followed  her  a  mile  before  I  stumbled 
into  camp. 

H.  was  already  in  camp  when  I  got  in,  and  was  worrying 
about  my  non-appearance.  He  had  done  better  than  I  had. 
He  was  a  better  rider,  and  his  horse  had  not  been  tired  out,  as 
had  mine.  He  had  killed  his  buffalo,  and  thought  one  enough. 
That  afternoon  and  evening  I  watched  the  women  coming  into 
the  camp  from  every  quarter.  How  they  did  it  I  did  not  and 
do  not  know.  The  camp  had  been  but  recently  pitched;  there 
were  no  signs  by  which  its  site  could  be  marked,  that  I  could 
make  out,  though  I  looked  carefully  for  such  signs  during  our 


96  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

stay  with  the  Crees.  Yet  those  Indian  women  would  listen  to 
a  description  of  where  their  man  had  killed  miles  away,  take  a 
pony,  pick  up  the  poles  of  the  traveaux,  and  go  sailing  off, 
steering  straight  for  that  distant  carcase,  skin  it,  cut  it  up,  save 
all  the  meat,  and  do  all  this  as  an  ordinary  day's  work.  Their 
enemies,  the  Blackfeet,  were  not  a  myth.  The  night  of  the 
day  I  am  writing  of  they  tried  to  run  off  our  horses,  and  did 
kill  one  of  the  Crees  guarding  the  herd.  Why  the  Crees  did 
not  lose  more  scalps  when  the  fighting  force  of  the  camp  was 
scattered  widely  over  all  the  country,  as  of  necessity  it  was 
when  all  hands  turned  out  to  hunt,  I  never  understood. 

Since  these  days  I  am  writing  of,  I  spent,  for  twelve  summers, 
two  months  in  what  was,  in  1869,  exclusively  Indian  country. 
I  have  also  read  many  books  about  the  Indians,  and  have  met 
hundreds  of  adventurers  of  all  sorts  who  came  in  touch  with 
them — soldiers,  prospectors,  cattlemen,  trappers.  By  far  the 
larger  part  of  these  had  no  good  word  to  say  for  the  red  man. 
I  formed  a  different  opinion.  I  found  him  a  savage,  of  course, 
but  as  savages  go,  a  very  decent  fellow.  I  camped  and  lived 
and  hunted  with  several  different  tribes  of  Indians,  "plain" 
and  "wood"  and  "mountain,"  and  got  to  like  them  all.  Space 
fails  me,  or  I  could  tell  interesting  things  about  them.  Almost 
all  have  perished  and  none  of  them  had  a  fair  show. 

Before  bidding  good-bye  to  my  Cree  hosts  I  must  tell  of  their 
persistency  in  begging,  and  of  their  powers  as  trencher  men. 
Little  begging  did  not  matter,  but  one  thing  they  wanted  I 
could  not  give:  that  was  my  double  Rigby,  and  I  found  to  my 
dismay  that  the  chief  had  set  his  heart  on  it.  One  morning  he 
came  round  with  a  fine  pony;  next  day  with  two.  Then  he 
hinted  at  his  daughter  thrown  in,  and  things  began  to  look 
serious.  "He  had  offered  us  the  shelter  of  the  camp."  "His 
braves  had  guarded  our  horses."  "The  white  man  had  many 
far-shooting  guns;  the  poor  Indian  few,"  and  so  on  ad  infinitum. 
What  he  said  was  true  enough,  and  what  he  did  not  say  was 
equally  true:  viz.,  we  were  completely  in  their  power,  and  if  he 
wanted  the  rifle  he  could  take  it,  and  I  had  no  other.  A  way 
out  occurred  to  me  at  last.  I  have  said  the  rifle  threw  a  heavy 
ball  and  took  a  large  charge  of  powder.  It  had  also  a  set 
trigger;  i.e.,  by  pulling  back  a  small  bolt  in  the  lock,  a  mere 
touch  on  the  trigger  would  discharge  the  piece.    One  day, 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  97 

when  I  was  taking  a  long  shot  at  an  antelope,  I  had  set  the  hair 
trigger,  and  having  loaded  rather  too  heavily,  the  shock  of  the 
right  barrel  going  off  had  set  the  left  off  at  the  same  time,  and  I 
had  a  kick  that  wrenched  my  shoulder.  So  next  morning, 
when  my  visitor  came  as  usual,  I  met  him  halfway.  "We  had 
been  well  treated,  and  we  would  always  tell  in  our  far-away 
home  how  honest  and  hospitable  were  the  plain  Crees  and 
their  war  chief.  He  should  have  my  rifle  for  two  ponies.  I 
could  not  accept  his  daughter,  for  in  our  country  the  man  who 
married  a  girl  till  his  mother  first  saw  and  approved  her  was 
reckoned  a  bad  man.  If  he  liked  my  rifle,  then  it  was  his.  I 
feared,  however,  that  he  would  not  like  it.  It  was  made  for  me, 
and  my  medicine  was  not  his  medicine.  It  shot  straight  for 
me,  but  I  did  not  think  he  would  like  the  way  it  shot  for  him. 
But  he  must  try  it  for  himself.  I  was  not  a  'forked  tongue,' 
as  were  some  of  the  'Long  Knives.'  Let  him  come  round  to- 
morrow morning  and  bring  some  of  his  braves,  and  he  should 
shoot  the  rifle  and  if  he  liked  it  have  it  for  his  own."  That  night 
I  loaded  that  rifle  as  it  had  never  been  loaded  before,  earnestly 
praying  that  John  Rigby's  good  workmanship  in  barrel  and 
stock  would  withstand  the  test. 

Round  came  my  man,  bright  and  early,  his  braves  with  him, 
and  the  news  of  the  great  gift  having  leaked  out,  there  were 
quite  a  lot  of  onlookers.  The  plain  Indians,  as  I  said  before, 
shoot  from  horseback  and  at  a  gallop.  I  set  the  hair  trigger 
and  gingerly  handed  the  weapon  to  my  host.  There  was  an 
open  space  in  front  of  our  tent,  and  in  the  middle  of  it  he  threw 
down  a  bit  of  hide  to  serve  as  a  mark.  Then  riding  some  hun- 
dred yards  away,  he  wheeled  his  pony,  came  by  at  a  fine  speed, 
and  holding  at  arms'  length  the  rifle,  let  drive.  The  effect  was 
tremendous.  Both  barrels  went  off  with  a  roar;  the  heavy 
gun  went  one  way,  the  pony  another  way,  the  dazed  rider 
another.  And  the  assembly  stood  speechless  for  a  moment, 
and  then  united  in  a  deep  "How,  how."  "Heap  medicine,"  he 
grunted,  and  gathering  himself  up,  let  the  gun  lie  where  it 
had  fallen.  John  Rigby's  work  held;  the  rifle  was  none  the 
worse,  and  my  stock  went  up  with  these  Crees. 

I  wish  I  could  give  more  space  to  my  experiences  among 
these  Indians  of  the  plain  and  their  enemies  of  the  forest  and 
the    mountains.     The    smallpox    epidemic    of   1870-2   never 


98  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

reached  the  white  folks  of  the  west,  but  it  wiped  out  whole 
camps,  almost  whole  tribes  of  the  red  man.  The  sweat  bath 
that  the  Indians  universally  used  was  a  cleanly  custom.  But 
the  sweat  bath  and  the  cold  plunge  was  sudden  death  to  the 
smallpox  smitten.  The  smallpox  came,  no  one  knew  from 
where,  the  spring  after  we  had  travelled  through  the  beautiful 
country  in  which  the  headwaters  of  the  Missouri  and  Saskatche- 
wan have  their  rise. 

So  it  was  my  good  luck  to  see  the  last  of  these  poor  people, 
who  were  ready  to  perish.  I  had  dreamed  of  meeting  them  and 
knowing  them  and  their  country,  and  my  boy's  dream  had  come 
true.  I  had  seen  the  red  man  in  his  home,  and  was  not  dis- 
appointed in  him. 


In  the  spring  we  had  intended  to  go  out  on  the  plains,  see 
them  and  the  buffalo,  and  turn  homeward  in  a  couple  of  months. 
Now  the  late  autumn  found  us  close  to  the  outlying  spurs  of 
the  Rocky  Mountains,  and  more  than  a  thousand  miles  to 
westward  of  our  starting  point.  The  spell  of  the  new  land  held 
us  fast,  and  having  come  so  far,  it  seemed  natural  to  press  still 
on,  pass  the  great  range  if  we  could,  and  so  complete  our 
journey  from  sea  to  sea. 

The  problem  to  be  solved  was  a  double  one:  could  we  cross 
the  mountains  before  the  late  autumn  snowfall  made  the  higher 
ranges  impassable?  And  could  we  get  a  guide  who  knew 
a  way  through  their  unmapped  main  chain  ?  Far  to  southward 
there  was  an  easy  and  well-known  road  on  which  thousands  had 
crossed  continuously  since  1849,  but  where  we  were,  near  the 
national  boundary  and  north  of  it,  snowy  peaks  rose  forbid- 
dingly and  the  barrier  was  formidable.  None  of  the  Hudson 
Bay  people,  their  Indians  or  their  half-breeds,  that  we  had  met, 
knew  anything  whatever  about  this  mountain  wilderness,  but 
that  there  were  Indians  in  some  of  the  forts  close  to  the  chain 
who  must  know,  seemed  certain;  and  with  their  aid  we  de- 
termined to  attempt  the  last  and  hardest  "leg"  of  our  jouruey. 

At  Rocky  Mountain  House,  our  final  starting  point,  the  first 
thing  to  do  was  to  convince  the  Commander  that  we  were  set 
on  crossing  the  mountains  and  doing  so  at  once.  He  was  a 
good  and  capable  officer,  but  had  never  been  himself  to  west- 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  99 

ward  of  the  stockade,  and  he  said  we  "were  going  to  our 
death."  In  midsummer  it  could  be  done;  now  the  snow  lay 
too  deep  already  on  the  ridges  we  had  to  cross.  No  pack  team 
could  travel  them.  Game  there  was  none.  We  were  sure  to 
be  pinned  in  between  the  ranges,  and  when  we  had  eaten  our 
ponies,  we  would  starve.  So  "for  God's  sake,  put  it  off  till 
spring,  and  make  a  comfortable  winter  of  it  with  him  at  the 
fort."  We  had  had  so  many  scares  coming  our  way  via  the 
Hudson  Bay  Company  that  we  were  not  now  as  much  im- 
pressed as  we  should  have  been.  As  it  turned  out,  we  did  take 
a  very  grave  risk,  and  did  escape  destruction  by  a  narrow 
margin. 

To  make  a  long  story  as  short  as  I  can,  we  did  get  away 
at  last,  if  not  with  our  host's  blessing,  certainly  with  the  very 
best  pack  outfit  he  could  supply,  with  carefully  chosen  pro- 
visions and,  best  of  all,  with  a  shrivelled-up  little  half-breed 
French-Stoney  guide  who  had  been  with  Lord  Milton  and 
Doctor  Cheadle  three  years  before  in  their  adventurous  cross- 
ing in  which  they  almost  perished;  who  did  know  the  difficulties 
and  dangers  ahead,  and  with  a  rare  combination  of  fatalism 
and  pluck,  declared  he  would  take  us  to  the  top  of  the  main 
divide  (not  a  foot  over  the  other  side)  or  never  come  near  the 
fort  and  his  family  again. 

It  was  a  splendid  fall  season,  and  that  was  in  our  favour: 
cold  at  night,  the  glass  going  below  zero,  and  great  chunks  of 
ice  coming  down  the  rivers,  but  no  snow  had  fallen,  and  we 
turned  our  backs  on  the  blue  line  of  plain,  and  faced  the  fir-clad 
mountain  slopes,  a  cheery  crowd. 

Carts  we  had  no  use  for,  nor  for  the  half-breeds  that  drove 
them,  and  to  face  new  difficulties  we  had  the  luck  to  find  new 
men.  Two  Indians,  the  guide  I  have  spoken  of  and  another 
Stoney,  and  two  roving  Scotsmen,  who  by  some  mischance  had 
tried  prospecting  on  the  upper  Saskatchewan  and  found  them- 
selves stranded  there.  They  had  the  choice  of  working  for 
their  grub  for  the  Company  all  the  long  winter  or  taking  risks 
with  us  of  reaching  the  west  coast.  We  made  them  an  offer, 
which  they  gladly  accepted,  and  they  served  us  right  well. 

The  day  we  left  Rocky  Mountain  House,  a  nice-looking 
young  Stoney  and  the  girl  he  married  that  morning  asked  if 
they  might  travel  with  us  till  we  reached  a  Stoney  camp,  at  the 


ioo  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

other  side  of  the  first  high  mountain  ridge.  We  said  "yes," 
and  they  came  along.  That  night  we  camped  by  a  river  where 
beaver  signs  were  plentiful,  and  in  the  evening  I  shot  one  on  the 
other  side  of  the  stream.  I  hated  to  lose  that  first  beaver  of 
mine,  and  so,  to  the  men's  consternation  (none  of  them  could 
swim;  I  never  met  a  Hudson  Bay  Indian  who  could,  though  they 
were  perpetually  on  the  water)  I  stripped  and  swam  across. 
Quite  a  swim,  the  current  very  fast  and  the  water  very  cold,  but 
I  got  my  beaver.  Early  next  morning,  before  the  sun  reached 
our  tent,  I  happened  to  go  down  to  the  river  bank  on  chance  of 
getting  another  beaver,  when  I  saw  in  front  of  me  an  amusing 
illustration  of  the  orthodox  Indian  idea  of  the  honeymoon 
duties  of  bride  and  groom.  The  frost  was  sharp,  the  shore  ice 
was  strengthening;  out  in  it,  up  to  her  waist,  her  pretty  buck- 
skin shirt  turned  over  her  shoulders  and  head,  stood  the  bride 
of  the  night  before,  busily  taking  up  the  traps  she  had  set  in  the 
evening  while  her  lord  and  master  sat,  I  suppose  admiringly 
on  the  bank,  dry  and  warm,  smoking  his  morning  pipe.  The 
bride  was  young  and  slim  and  pretty,  and  did  her  job  gaily, 
for  she  laughed  at  me  as  I  turned  away  to  allow  her  to  come  out 
of  the  icy  stream  and  dress. 

We  now  worked  steadily  into  the  mountains,  sometimes 
following  an  elk  trail,  oftener  making  our  own,  and  it  was 
very  evident  that  our  guide  knew  his  business.  We  were 
going  against  time;  every  hour  counted.  It  was  dark  and  cold 
in  those  pine-clad  ravines  in  the  early  mornings,  but  he  kept 
all  hands  on  the  job.  The  horses  suffered  most,  for  to  let  them 
graze  at  night  meant  running  the  risk  of  their  taking  the  back 
trail  to  the  fort. 

In  five  days'  hard  marching  we  made  the  Stoney  camp. 
We  were  tired  when  the  flicker  of  the  camp-fire  greeted  us,  and 
turned  in  at  once.  Early  next  morning  I  was  roused  by  a 
strange  sound.  Indians  were  trying  to  sing  something.  It 
was  not  an  ordinary  Indian  song,  a  sing-song  sort  of  chanting 
in  monotone.  There  was  in  this  an  effort  to  strike  a  tune.  I 
went  outside,  and,  in  a  circle  on  the  frosty  grass,  knelt  over  a 
hundred  men  and  women  and  children,  while  a  young  man  in  a 
black  coat  led  the  singing  and  offered  prayer.  There  was  a 
genuineness  about  that  morning  worship  that  was  immensely 
impressive  to  me.     Many  years  before  a  Methodist  missionary 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND        101 

had  made  a  home  among  that  little  band  of  mountain  folk. 
Seventeen  years  before  he  had  left  them,  but  they  had  done,  dur- 
ing all  those  years,  what  he  had  taught  them  to  do,  and  every 
night  and  morning  they  met  for  singing  and  for  prayer. 

We  stayed  a  few  days  with  these  "Stoneys,"  to  rest  our  tired 
horses  and  fit  them  for  the  fierce  work  that  lay  just  ahead. 
We  hunted  sheep  and  goats,  which  were  plentiful,  and  I  tried  to 
find  out  more  about  that  hero  missionary  whose  work  lived  so 
long  after  his  departure;  but  they  could  not  speak  English,  and 
our  only  means  of  communication  was  our  guide,  who  also 
could  speak  no  English  and  only  a  little  patois  French.  So  we 
were  barred  from  talking  to  one  another,  yet  one  had  a  real 
home  feeling  as  we  gathered,  red  men  and  white,  round  the  fire 
in  the  evening  to  pray,  or  knelt  at  morning  on  the  frosty  grass. 
If  there  was  not  one  word  we  could  say'  to  one  another,  our 
hands  as  they  were  clasped  said  many  things. 

I  have  but  a  confused  memory  of  our  final  struggle  with 
the  mountains.  I  did  not  keep  up  my  diary.  I  was  too  ex- 
hausted at  night  to  do  so.  How  we  got  up  and  over  those 
ridges,  and  along  those  steep  slopes  of  sliding  rock,  I  do  not 
know.  We  carried  plenty  of  rawhide  rope,  and  with  this,  as 
we  warped  it  round  rocks  and  tree  stumps,  our  laden  ponies 
were  helped  up  and  lowered  down.  Still  our  fortune  held,  the 
skies  above  were  blue,  and  there  was  no  new  snow  to  contend 
with,  only  that  which  had  already  fallen  above  timber  line. 
Somewhere  near  Athabasca  Pass,  it  must  have  been,  where  we 
mounted  the  first  of  the  great  ridges,  and  beyond  it  and  be- 
neath, we  were  swallowed  up  in  the  dreary  darkness  of  the 
forest.  How  our  little  Stoney  half-breed  held  a  straight 
course  through  that  forest  I  don't  know.  I  think  I  remember 
correctly  when  I  say  that,  for  fourteen  consecutive  days,  we 
never  had  one  gleam  of  sun  strike  our  camp.  Yet  the  skies 
were  cloudless.  The  chill  of  the  sunless  forest  struck  into  your 
bones.  The  pines  were  tall  as  they  stood  packed  together; 
heavy  growth  of  gray  moss  hanging  from  them  everywhere. 
And  where  they  fell,  either  because  they  were  old,  or  because 
some  mountain  blast  had  torn  them  from  their  rooting,  they 
fell  in  long  lines  and  swaths  that  rose,  barrier-like,  defying 
progress.  There  was  no  trail,  no  sound  of  bird  or  beast,  no 
sign  of  man.     A  dreadful  deadly  sort  of  wood,  in  which  men 


102  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

had  often  disappeared  and  been  lost  forever.  Our  Scotsmen 
were  good  with  the  axe,  we  all  did  our  best;  but  strive  as  we 
might,  on  some  days  we  did  not  make  two  miles'  advance,  and 
to  keep  a  consistent  course  in  such  a  giant  tangle  needed  an  un- 
canny gift  of  woodcraft.  This  our  man  had  and  it  saved  us, 
for  now  at  last  we  realized  what  a  risk  we  had  taken.  Now  we 
knew  that  if  any  heavy  snowfall  came  while  we  were  buried  in 
the  forest,  our  chances  of  ever  leaving  it  were  slim  indeed. 

In  the  beginning  of  my  story  I  have  tried  to  say  something 
of  what  I  felt  when  at  last  we  burst  out  of  this  terrible  woodland 
and  looked  down  on  the  warmer,  more  open  country  that 
lay  beyond.  What  a  change  was  there!  Still  the  sun  shone, 
and  now  it  sparkled  on  lovely  lakes,  fringed  with  crowded 
pine  woods  where  the  trees,  huddled  together,  pressed  and 
tumbled  each  other  into  the  water.  Now  there  was  room,  and 
spaciousness,  and  tall  trunks  arose,  spreading  great  arms  out 
on  all  sides,  and  beneath  them  the  sod  was  clean  and  clear  of 
debris,  and  so  open  that  it  was  as  though  a  great  garden  of 
forest  trees  throve  there,  and  not  a  chanceful  primeval  wood. 

On  the  crest  of  the  divide  our  brave  leader  bade  us  good-bye, 
as  he  said  he  would.  He  pointed  down  the  beautiful  slopes  and 
valleys  beneath  us  to  where  we  would  find  the  long  chain  of 
Columbia  lakes.  These  we  must  follow  till  their  outflow  led 
us  to  the  great  river  that  would  take  us  to  the  sea.  It  was 
years  since  he  had  steered  a  Company's  bateau  down  its  rapids, 
and  skirted  its  great  whirlpool  at  Okinagan  Canyon,  and  now 
he  was  old  and  could  never  see  it  again.  But  the  trail  for 
us  was  straight  and  plain.  Soon  we  would  strike  it,  and — he 
had  done  his  best  to  bring  us  where  we  wanted  to  go.  A 
simple,  honest,  brave,  and  resourceful  man  was  our  Stoney. 
He  was  well  satisfied  with  what  H.  gave  him,  and  somehow  he 
made  the  Stoney's  camp  before  a  snowfall. 

Except  for  one  or  two  hard  falls  riding  buffalo  I  had  not  had 
a  pain  or  an  ache  since  we  left  Sauk  Centre.  I  now  met  with 
an  accident  that  might  have  been  serious.  We  had  entered  the 
Kootenay  region,  and  leaving  the  camp  I  spoke  of  some  time 
back,1  were  making  for  Fort  Colville,  the  highest  U.  S.  Army 
post  on  the  Columbia  River.  We  had  camped  late,  and  the 
night  promised  to  be  cold,  and  after  supper  I  went  out  to  cut 

Account  of  that  camp  omitted  for  lack  of  space. 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  103 

some  more  wood  for  our  fire.  In  the  darkness  my  axe  some- 
how glanced,  and  the  blade  cut  deeply  into  my  moccasined 
foot,  almost  splitting  it.  I  feared  at  first  I  had  cut  an  artery, 
for  blood  came  in  spurts,  but  when  kind  hands  helped  me  to  the 
fireside,  and  when  H.  had  bound  the  wound  as  well  as  he  could, 
the  heavy  flow  ceased. 

We  knew  that  Fort  Colville  was  the  headquarters  of  an 
infantry  regiment,  and  that  there  must  be  a  doctor  there,  but 
how  far  off  it  was  we  did  not  know.  H.  said  he  would  start 
at  once  for  the  fort,  and  bring  the  doctor.  I  tried  to  persuade 
him  to  stay  till  morning.  The  trail  was  bad,  not  easy  to  follow 
by  daylight,  and  dangerous  to  attempt  in  the  dark,  for  it  ran 
sometimes  on  the  very  edge  of  the  rushing  stream.  But  noth- 
ing I  could  say  would  stop  my  friend,  and  leading  the  best  pony 
we  had  he  went  off. 

The  night  became  bitterly  cold,  I  was  in  a  good  deal  of  pain, 
and  had  it  not  been  for  the  resourceful  kindness  of  one  of  my 
Scotsmen,  that  night's  frost  might  have  complicated  my 
recovery.  My  men  lifted  me  out  of  our  tent,  and  built  a  small 
fire  at  my  foot,  and  sitting  beside  it  kept  it  burning  steadily 
all  the  long  night  through.  By  morning  I  felt  better  and  had 
some  sleep.  Later  in  the  day  an  Indian  turned  up.  He  had 
been  catching  trout  for  winter  food,  and  he  took  quite  an 
interest  in  the  stranger  white  man's  trouble.  He  said  his 
squaw  could  cure  that  wound,  and  he  would  send  her  round. 
Soon  she  came,  and  very  gently  unbound  the  roughly  tied 
bandages.  She  did  this  part  of  the  business  so  well  that  I  had 
immediate  relief  from  pain,  and  there  was  no  fresh  bleeding. 
She  refused  to  put  the  wrappings  on  again,  and  went  away, 
saying  she  would  return.  When  she  did,  she  carried  a  bundle 
of  twigs  of  some  tree  I  did  not  recognize,  and  with  these  in  her 
lap,  sat  down  at  my  foot  and  began  to  chew  them  up.  When 
her  mouth  was  so  full  she  could  cram  no  more  sticks  into  it,  she 
took  the  chewed-up  stuff  and  laid  it  on  the  open  cut.  Hour 
after  hour  she  sat  there,  steadily  chewing  and  poulticing  me 
with  the  result.  All  that  long  day  my  poor  red  nurse  sat  there 
and  chewed,  and  next  morning  she  came  again  and  chewed,  till 
the  pain  and  inflammation  left  my  wound.  She  did  not  seem 
to  expect  a  present;  she  certainly  did  not  ask  for  one,  but  her 
stolid  face  showed  satisfaction  at  what  I  gave  her,  and  she 


io4  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

deserved  the  best  I  had  to  give,  for  in  that  wild  cruel  country- 
she  had  acted  the  Good  Samaritan  to  me.  I  thought  of  the 
other  poor  shrieking  mother  whose  boys,  but  a  few  days  before, 
had  been  murdered  in  the  mining  camp  not  so  far  away. 
Perhaps  she  was  just  the  same  sort  of  a  kindly,  competent 
mother  as  my  nurse  must  have  been. 

H.,  when  he  got  in,  was  all  used  up.  He  had  walked  and 
ridden  about  a  hundred  and  twenty  miles,  and  twice  crossed 
the  cold  and  dangerous  stream  in  those  three  days  and  nights, 
and  done  it  on  one  meal. 

The  friends  thou  hast,  and  their  adoption  tried, 
Grapple  them  to  thy  soul  with  hoops  of  steel. 

He  had  reached  the  post  on  the  afternoon  of  the  day  after 
he  had  left  camp.  There  they  urged  him  to  stay  at  least  for 
one  night's  rest,  but,  very  anxious  about  me,  he  refused,  and 
started  back  as  soon  as  he  had  eaten.  The  doctor  was  to  follow 
by  canoe.  The  Columbia  was  swollen  and  dangerous,  and  no 
canoe  appeared  for  two  more  days.  When  it  came,  I  was 
swept  smoothly  down  the  sixty  miles  to  Fort  Colville  in  a  few 
hours. 

I  can  never  repay,  any  more  than  I  can  forget,  the  kindness 
of  those  people  of  the  22nd  U.  S.  Infantry  at  Fort  Colville.  We 
were  strangers  to  them,  and  had  no  introduction  or  guarantee 
whatever;  but  if  I  had  been  a  near  relative,  nothing  more  could 
have  been  done  for  me  than  they  did.  Major  Egan  and  his 
charming  and  beautiful  wife  put  me  to  bed  in  their  best  room, 
and  all  the  resources  of  the  post  were  at  our  service,  and  without 
one  penny  of  cost.  Such  was  hospitality  on  the  far  frontier  in 
those  days.  The  only  bill  we  could  persuade  any  single  one  of 
them  to  present  was  that  modest  one  of  the  regimental  doctor. 
My  wound  was  now  examined,  and  the  efficiency  of  my  Indian 
nurse's  treatment  acknowledged,  if  a  little  grudgingly.  The 
large  tendon  had  been  cut  through,  and  my  big  toe  had  a  down- 
ward inclination  that  looked  funny,  but  there  was  no  inflam- 
mation, and  everything  was  healing  up  "by  first  intention." 
A  shingle  was  tied  under  the  foot  to  encourage  the  drooping  toe, 
and  I  was  promoted  to  the  sofa. 

The  question  arose,  how  were  we  to  get  on  with  our  journey? 
Or  indeed  could  we  get  on  with  it  at  all  ?     I  found  there  was  one 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  105 

thing  the  severed  nerves  of  my  foot  refused  to  let  me  do:  that 
was  to  have  my  leg  hang  down.  I  made  a  trial  of  riding,  and 
was  lifted  on  horseback.  I  could  grip  the  saddle,  but  the  pain 
in  the  wounded  leg  became  intolerable.  So  riding  was  done 
with  for  the  present.  (It  was  years  before  I  could  let  my  leg 
hang  down  with  comfort.) 

Major  and  Mrs.  Egan  urged  us  to  stay  till  spring  at  the  fort, 
but  we  were  beginning  to  feel  homesick.  We  had  had  a  great 
journey  and  a  wonderful  time.  I  was  thinking  of  Cambridge 
and  the  ministry,  and  H.  had  made  up  his  mind,  after  long  con- 
sideration, to  give  up  brewing  beer  and  to  devote  himself  to 
medicine.  So  both  of  us  were  impatient  of  delay.  But  I 
could  not  ride;  there  were  no  roads;  how  could  we  get  on? 
There  occurred  to  us  the  farewell  words  of  our  faithful  little 
Stoney,  as  he  stood  by  our  side  for  the  last  time  on  the  Great 
Divide,  and,  across  many  a  mile  of  wooded  ridge  and  valley, 
pointed  the  way  to  the  Columbia  and  the  sea.  Many  a  night 
in  the  dark  forest  he  had  told  us  of  his  adventures  on  the  great 
river;  of  its  roaring  rapids,  far  larger  and  fiercer  than  any  on 
the  Saskatchewan  or  the  Missouri,  and  of  the  salmon  that  lay 
stranded  in  thousands  on  its  shoals,  on  which  the  bears  came 
down  from  the  country-side  to  feed. 

He  had  floated  down  it  laden  with  the  fur  hunter's  spoils, 
floated  more  than  halfway  from  Kettle  Falls  to  the  sea;  dashed 
through  many  a  rapid,  swept  under  mighty  cliffs  of  black 
basalt  that  shut  out  the  sun,  and  skirting  the  dreaded  Okinagan 
Whirlpool,  the  supreme  danger  of  the  journey,  beached  at  last 
his  bateau  where  the  impossibly  wild  waters  of  the  Dalles 
blocked  all  further  way. 

Why,  here  were  the  Kettle  Falls!  Not  ten  miles  from  the 
fort.  Why  not  run  down  the  river,  and  take  the  steamboat 
that  ran  once  a  week  from  the  Dalles  to  Portland?  If  we 
could  but  find  a  boat  and  crew,  the  thing  could  be  done.  So, 
while  I  lay  on  the  sofa,  H.  hunted  the  countryside,  and  found  a 
two-ton  Hudson  Bay  boat,  built  the  year  before,  and  a  tough 
old  voyageur  who  had  made  the  hazardous  trip  many  seasons, 
but  this  year  had  found  himself  stranded  among  the  Kootenay 
Indians  at  Colville,  because  the  Company  had  packed  their 
pelts  down  by  land,  having  given  up  the  river  route.  He 
therefore  was  anxious  to  go  down,  though  for  the  week's  trip 


io6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

(the  current  was  so  strong  that  it  was  not  unusual  to  make  those 
four  hundred  miles  in  that  time)  he  wanted  $65  in  gold,  an 
exorbitant  price!  As  we  went  into  the  matter  with  him,  the 
trouble  leaked  out.  The  last  down-river  voyage  had  ended  in 
disaster.  Three  boats  had  been  lost  in  the  Okinagan  Whirlpool, 
with  a  large  part  of  their  crews  of  twenty-seven  men  and  their 
cargoes.  Hence  the  change  of  route,  and  the  Company's 
determination  to  abandon  the  river.  We  seemed  to  be  up 
against  it  again.  However,  it  was  go  down  now  by  boat  or 
wait  indefinitely  till  I  could  ride,  and  we  decided  to  take  the 
risk.  H.  had  rowed  three  years  in  the  Cambridge  'Varsity, 
and  he  rather  fancied  himself  as  stroke.  I  would  sit  in  the 
stern  with  my  foot  raised  up,  and  shout  a  translation  of  our 
steersman's  orders  when  necessary  to  the  motley  band  of 
Scotsmen  and  half-breed  Kootenays  that  must  make  up  our 
crew.  A  new  experience  is  always  interesting,  and  the  last 
leg  of  our  adventure  was  certainly  a  novelty. 

H.  got  his  crew  together,  and  for  a  couple  of  days  took  them 
out  for  trial  spins.  The  Scotsmen  had  never  rowed,  the 
Indians  had  only  paddled,  and  two  of  them  had  never  been  on 
the  water  at  all.  I  wish  I  could  have  seen  that  crew  when  H. 
first  got  it  together,  or  better  have  "snapped"  it,  but  there 
were  no  "Kodaks"  in  those  days.  H.,  however,  was  en- 
couraged.    He  said  they  were  a  sinewy  lot  and  willing  to  work. 

I  got  down  somehow  to  the  river  bank,  and  the  boys  helped 
me  aboard.  The  Kettle  Falls  roared  just  above  our  landing 
place. 

The  splendid  weather  still  held,  though  it  was  cold.  The 
men  were  rowing  and  did  not  feel  it.  I  was  well  muffled  up, 
and  that  last  rush  we  made  to  the  sea  was  really  fine.  H.  had 
his  crew  of  eight  husky  fellows  quite  "well  together,"  and  they 
got  good  "steering  way"  on  our  big  ship  before  we  reached  the 
rapids.  Once  in  them,  oars  were  tossed  in  the  air,  and  safety 
depended  on  the  keen  eye  and  strong  arm  of  our  steersman, 
who  stood  high  above  the  crew  on  a  platform,  steering  with  a 
broad-bladed  sweep  that  was  lashed  to  the  stern.  He,  and  I, 
who  sat  up  near  him,  were  the  only  ones  who  saw  the  white 
tumult  of  that  river.  The  rowers  had  their  backs  to  it,  and  so 
great  was  the  rush  of  water  that  the  actual  passage  of  a  rapid 
seemed  an  affair  of  seconds  only.     Our  good  fortune  held  when 


THE  GREAT  LONE  LAND  107 

we  raced  between  the  walls  of  the  dreaded  Okinagan  Canyon, 
and  literally  were  shot  out  between  them  into  sudden  calmness 
and  safety.  There  was  no  whirlpool  there  in  our  day.  Once  out 
of  the  canyon  you  could  have  crossed  the  whirlpool's  lair  in 
a  birchbark  canoe.  The  dark  approach  to  it  was  not  so  much 
a  rapid  as  a  long  sloping  fall.  To  the  exact  length  of  that  fall 
of  water  I  cannot  swear.  It  was  said  to  be  two  miles,  which  I 
do  not  believe,  but  I  can  swear  to  the  time  it  took  us  to  sweep 
down  it,  for  I  had  my  watch  in  hand.  It  was  a  few  seconds 
short  of  two  minutes. 

And  what  a  delightful  journey  it  had  been!  To  bring  over 
and  settle  eight  hundred  immigrants  we  had  undertaken  it, 
and  now  we  were  leaving  them  behind  us  in  a  new  land  that,  by 
personal  observation,  we  knew  something  about.  We  had  seen 
Canada,  the  little  unexpanded  Canada  of  those  days,  Canada 
that  could  only  with  difficulty  keep  her  residents  and  her  immi- 
grants from  being  drawn  across  her  long  frontier  to  take  their 
place  in  the  intenser  life  of  her  great  neighbour.1  Then  the 
greatest  domain  that  had  ever  been  opened  to  the  industry  of 
civilized  man  we  saw.  Next,  at  the  other  side  of  the  mountains, 
as  by  some  sudden  miracle,  we  had  passed  from  deadly  frost 
and  darkness  into  fresh  greenery  and  colour  and  sunlight,  and 
had  thawed  the  winter  out  of  us  by  the  sunny  sea.  Here, 
from  northern  Vancouver  to  the  Mexican  border,  was  another 
land  of  promise,  rich  and  beautiful  after  its  own  wonderful  way. 
Lastly,  over  a  good  part  of  the  devastated,  blood-soaked 
South  we  had  travelled,  and  the  awakening  hope  and  energy 
of  its  people  was  impressive.  Surely  the  South  would  rise 
again. 

It  was  springtime  now,  just  three  years  after  Doctor  Q.  had 
condemned  me  to  death  in  his  stuffy  office  in  London,  and  I  was 
sailing  home  full  of  life  and  hope,  yes,  and  with  some  purpose, 
too.  I  had  thought  the  matter  of  a  life's  profession  over  con- 
stantly, and  as  I  did  so,  the  work  of  the  ministry  appealed  to 
me  more  and  more,  and  an  army  life  less  and  less.  The  idea 
of  "service"  had  begun  to  awaken  within  me,  and  I  feel  sure 
that  this  desire  to  serve  my  fellows  had  unconsciously  been 
quickened  and  stimulated  by  the  absorbing  interest  awakened 

'We  made  a  brief  visit  to  Ontario,  before  sailing  from  the  East  for  home,  and  learned  that  a  large 
proportion  of  our  East  Londoners  had  already  deserted  the  Dominion  for  the  United  States. 


108  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

by  these  many  new  types  and  conditions  of  peoples  to  whom 
my  journey  had  introduced  me.  I  began  to  see  for  myself  the 
innate  possibility  of  good  in  people  that  my  boyhood's  training 
had  insisted  were  bad.  And,  still  further,  that  even  social 
outcasts  had  within  them  springs  of  goodness  that  proved  them 
to  be  sons,  if  prodigal  sons,  of  their  Father.  I  was  as  yet  far 
from  rinding  a  place  for  these  soul  awakenings  of  mine,  in  my 
poor  little  doctrinal  equipment,  but  these  vital  experiences  I 
had  been  through  had  planted  new  seeds  within  me,  and  they 
took  root  and  grew. 


CHAPTER  IX 

Cambridge 

I  came  back  to  England  a  young  man;  I  had  left  it  a  boy. 
My  chest  weakness  was  a  thing  of  the  past.  I  had  gained 
twenty  pounds  in  weight,  and  though  thin  I  was  unusually 
tough  and  well  capable  of  enduring  fatigue.  I  set  to  work 
at  once  to  prepare  for  Cambridge  University.  I  had  chosen  my 
profession,  and  I  ardently  looked  forward  to  entering  the 
ministry. 

I  found  my  mother  weaker  and  full  of  pain.  Her  health 
had  grown  worse  during  my  year  of  absence,  and  the  doctors 
having  advised  country  air  for  her,  the  family  had  moved  to 
Norwood.  As  it  turned  out  she  gained  nothing  by  the  change, 
nor  I  think  did  any  of  us.  We  all  lost  a  good  deal  by  leaving 
London,  and  Father's  work  was  made  more  difficult. 

I  lost  no  time  in  hunting  up  my  friends,  Miss  Logan  and 
F.  N.  Charrington.  Charrington  had  bought  a  little  house, 
No.  2,Bethnal  Green,  had  given  up  his  partnership  in  his  father's 
brewery,  and  had  gone  to  live  in  the  East  End  permanently. 
If  he  is  still  alive  he  is  living  there  to-day.  He,  Keith  Faulkner, 
and  the  band  I  had  left  were  still  working  together,  but  as  they 
were  all  of  them  stern  Evangelicals,  they  had  no  associations 
with  the  Oxford  men  who  were  by  that  time  firmly  established 
in  the  same  great,  gray,  desolate  field  of  work.  And  now  that 
I  came  back  to  it,  after  my  plunge  into  the  wide  world  beyond, 
now  that  I  saw  it  again,  its  crowded  misery,  its  contented 
hopelessness;  the  contrast  of  it  all  with  what  I  had  lately  seen, 
lived  in,  and  rejoiced  in,  came  to  me  with  a  power,  called  to  me 
with  a  persistence  I  had  never  felt  before.  I  began  to  feel  a 
great  desire  to  bring  the  church  to  the  poor.  When  first  I 
worked  in  East  London,  I  came  as  one  whose  world  was  small 
and  who  from  babyhood  had  been  accustomed  to  accept  grind- 
ing poverty  as  the  necessary  lot  of  multitudes.    Here  I  was 

109 


no  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

back  in  it  again,  after  a  year  spent  where  poverty  was  not  a 
necessity,  in  a  wide  new  land  where  everyone  had  a  chance, 
and  by  contrast  East  London  was  infinitely  depressing.  Its 
rows  of  gray  yellow  two-story  brick  hovels,  cluster  on  cluster, 
mile  after  mile,  streets,  lanes,  crescents  endlessly  repeated, 
seemed  as  if  vast  insect  swarms  had  spawned  there,  and  fas- 
tened the  houses  where  they  stood.  No  free  space,  no  greenery, 
no  playground,  no  beauty  anywhere,  and  ever  over  them  hang- 
ing a  dirty  smoke-laden  pall.  A  hopeless  place  in  which  to  be 
born  and  live  and  die.  East  London  has  changed  much  since 
then,  but  it  is  dismal  enough  to  live  in  still. 

I  was  to  enter  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge,  in  October,  if 
I  could  pass  the  entrance  examination.  Now  it  was  May,  so 
I  set  to  work  morning  and  afternoon  with  tutors,  to  furbish  up 
such  little  classical  and  mathematical  knowledge  as  my  rickety 
memory  retained  from  changeful  and  unsatisfactory  school 
experiences.  I  find  little  that  is  interesting  and  worth  relating 
in  my  Cambridge  days  and  as  I  am  pressed  for  space  I  shall 
make  but  brief  reference  to  them.  Cambridge  was  a  disap- 
pointment to  me.  I  did  not  gain  much  by  my  three  years' 
residence  there.  I  do  not,  however,  think  that  this  was  the 
fault  of  the  University.  I  was  grossly  ignorant  of  most  things 
schools  should  teach  when  I  went  up.  I  had  a  mere  smattering 
of  Latin  and  Greek,  worse  than  a  smattering  of  history, 
and  knew  nothing  whatever  of  English  composition.  Math- 
ematics I  liked,  but  of  physical  science  and  natural 
science  I  knew  nothing  at  all.  Many  of  my  friends  could  write 
Latin  prose  and  Greek  verse  (they  had  the  advantage  of  me 
there) ; and  some  were  good  mathematicians;  but  really  cultured 
men  I  did  not  meet,  or  if  I  met  them,  did  not  come  to  know 
them  while  I  was  an  undergraduate.  There  were  scholarships 
endowed  hundreds  of  years  before,  and  these,  as  was  intended, 
were  still  open  to  the  North  Country  boy  who  loved  his 
mathematics,  or  to  the  poor  parson's  son  whose  father  gave  him 
a  grinding  in  the  classics.  Such  humble  devotees  of  learning 
might  pursue  their  unostentatious  way,  might  in  time  become 
"fellows"  of  their  college,  and  live  henceforth  in  slippered 
ease,  but  they  counted  for  nothing  in  our  social  life.  As  under- 
graduates they  were  unknown,  as  Dons  unheeded.  We  did  not 
attend  their  lectures  unless  we  had  to,  and  we  seldom  had  to. 


CAMBRIDGE  ill 

There  must  have  been  a  number  of  brilliant  men  serving  as 
"Dons"  (professors),  but  I  seldom  came  across  them.  Be- 
tween the  Dons  and  the  undergraduate  a  great  gulf  was  fixed 
in  those  days,  and  neither,  so  far  as  I  saw,  had  any  desire  to 
cross  it. 

Apropos  of  Cambridge  Dons,  my  first  meeting  with  one 
of  the  best  known  of  them,  Todhunter,  was  amusing.  Every 
would-be  Johnian  had  to  pass  a  mathematical  examination 
before  entering  the  college.  On  the  day  of  arrival,  you  went 
to  the  College  hall,  and  there  a  long  paper  covering  a  large 
mathematical  field  was  given  you  as  a  test.  You  had  three 
hours  to  work  on  it. 

The  day  was  lovely.  I  had  had  a  notice  to  present  myself 
for  a  first  "tubbing"  at  the  boat  house,  and  if  I  gave  three 
hours  to  that  paper  there  would  be  no  "tubbing"  for  me.  As 
I  studied  it,  I  saw  that  the  greater  part  was  quite  beyond  my 
very  moderate  mathematical  powers,  so  I  took  a  chance  and 
had  a  try  at  the  one  or  two  problems  with  which  it  ended.  This 
did  not  take  long  and  I  got  to  the  boat  club  in  time. 

The  results  of  that  first  examination  were  posted  on  the 
notice  board  next  day,  and  the  names  of  the  would-be  John- 
ians  were  classified  roughly  in  five  or  six  divisions.  To  my 
consternation,  I  found  my  name  among  the  very  few  in  the  first 
list,  the  members  of  which  were  directed  to  report  to  the  great 
Todhunter  for  further  instruction. 

I  made  my  way  at  once  to  the  rooms  of  the  famous  Don  and 
tried  to  explain  matters.  I  was  not  seeking  mathematical 
honours;  I  was  a  pass  man.  I  had  attempted  the  problems 
because  I  could  not  do  the  whole  paper,  and  I  very  particularly 
wanted  to  keep  my  appointment  at  the  Boats.  He  was  most 
kind  and  laughed  heartily.  "You  are  a  good  mathematician 
spoiled,"  he  said,  "  but  you  are  right.  I  should  never  have 
been  a  Don.  Young  man,  there  are  few  more  deadly,  more 
killing  things  than  the  life  of  a  Cambridge  Don.  Never  be  a 
Don." 

I  quote  from  memory,  but  I  give  the  spirit  of  what  he  said. 
Later,  I  found  that  this  half-humorous,  half-earnest  advice 
Todhunter  gave  in  his  lectures  constantly. 

The  ancient  office  of  Tutor  existed  for  the  excellent  pur- 
pose of  helping  undergraduates  to  make  the  most  of  their  ad- 


ii2  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

vantages.  Once  I  suppose  it  must  have  functioned.  In  my 
time  it  certainly  had  fallen  into  "innocuous  desuetude."  You 
found  yourself  charged  two  pounds  ten  a  term  for  tutors'  fees. 
You  never  saw  your  tutor  except  at  the  hopelessly  dull  dinner  to 
which,  at  very  rare  intervals,  he  asked  you.  Your  real  tutor 
was  paid  nine  pounds  a  term  and  was  called  your  "coach. " 

I  was  elected  to  the  "Union"  and  soon  after  to  the  "Pitt," 
this  last  a  rather  exclusive  club.  At  the  Union  there  were  the 
papers  and  debating;  at  the  Pitt,  instead  of  debates  we  en- 
joyed college  gossip  and  good  tea.  There  was  little  or  no 
drinking.  I  never  saw  men  drunk  there,  and  the  members 
were  a  clean,  well  set-up,  well-dressed  crowd,  but  in  neither 

club  was  there  anything  to  stimulate  study.     H ,  always 

ready  to  do  the  kind  thing,  took  me  up  in  October  and  intro- 
duced me  to  my  tutor,  and  what  was  of  immensely  more  im- 
portance, to  the  very  great  man  indeed  who  was  Captain  of  the 
Boats.  Goldie  was  a  "Johnian,"  and  had  done  more  than 
any  member  of  the  old  college  had  ever  done  to  lift  its  head 
high  on  the  River.  A  long  series  of  defeats  had  been  meted 
out  to  us  by  Oxford.  Goldie  had  toiled  with  Cambridge  raw 
material  till  he  had  succeeded  in  turning  continuous  defeat 
into  dazzling  victory.  For  three  consecutive  years  he  had 
stroked  Cambridge's  victorious  crew  at  Mortlake.  The  great 
man  looked  my  slender  height  over  and  was  gruffly  polite. 

Here  I  must  say  something  about  rowing,  and  what  I  think 
it  did  for  me,  who,  unfortunately,  as  I  shall  tell,  never  made  a 
success  of  it.  My  rowing  experiences  began  at  once.  I  was 
told  to  report  at  Lady  Margaret1  rowing  club  next  afternoon. 

H- had  assured  me  some  attention  there  by  saying  that  I 

ought  in  time  to  fill  out  and  make  an  oar.  He  had  given  me 
some  instruction  in  preliminaries,  such  as  how  to  use  my 
stretcher  (this  was  before  the  days  of  sliding  seats).  The 
secret  of  good  stretcher  work  was  to  get  your  hips  and  thighs 
into  the  stroke  with  arms  straight.  Freshmen  were  first 
"tubbed,"  i.  e.,  were  taken  out  in  ordinary  two-oar  rowing 
boats  by  "old  oars,"  to  have  their  first  lessons.  Sometimes  a 
cox  was  taken  along;  oftener  there  were  only  the  two,  the 
teacher  and  the  taught.     You  rowed  at  stroke,  he  coached 

*Lady  Margaret  was  our  Sixteenth  Century  Foundress.     St.  John's  Rowing  Club  was  named 
after  her. 


CAMBRIDGE  113 

you  from  behind.     H said  before  leaving,  "Do  your  best 

the  first  time  they  tub  you,  a  lot  depends  on  that.  Remember 
what  I  taught  you."  So  it  was  with  my  heart  very  much  in 
my  mouth  that  I  made  my  way  to  the  riverside  next  day,  and 
was  comforted  somewhat  to  notice  that  the  other  freshmen 

seemed  as  much  scared  as  I  was.    H 's  introduction  served 

me,  and  I  was  taken  out  by  a  very  great  man  indeed,  who, 
though  not  a  "Varsity  oar,"  had  for  three  years  rowed  in  the 
"  trials,"  i.  e.,  the  two  eights  made  up  of  likely  men  and  set  to 
race  each  other  in  order  to  find  material  for  the  next  University 
crew. 

We  got  into  the  tub,  I  was  given  stroke,  and  we  pushed 
out  into  old  Cam's  dirty  and  unsavoury  stream.  (The  town 
drainage  then  ran  into  the  Cam.)  Goldie  and  a  lot  of  old 
oars  were  there,  interested  in  seeing  what  promise  of  good 
stuff  there  might  be  in  the  freshmen  of  the  year.  As  the  light 
blue  had  triumphed  atMortlake,so  had  Lady  Margaret's  colours 
come  to  the  fore  in  the  "May,"  and  Goldie  was  stroking  the 
second  boat  on  the  river,  if  I  remember  correctly.  So  interest 
was  keen  that  year  in  the  freshmen's  turnout.  As  I  sat  there, 
the  crowd  on  the  bank  and  on  the  club's  balcony  looking  down 
on  us,  I  felt — well,  almost  as  badly  as  I  did  when  Admiral 
Fishbourne  unexpectedly  called  on  me  to  speak  at  that  first 
meeting  in  Bethnal  Green  Baptist  Chapel.  That  passed,  and 
I  set  my  teeth  and  began  to  get  hold  of  the  water.  The  man 
behind  me  weighed  ten  pounds  more  than  I  did  (I  stripped 
only  one  hundred  and  seventy),  and  he  was  a  very  pretty  oar. 
Rowing  bow  he  had,  too,  greater  power  over  our  course  than 
I  had,  at  stroke,  but  I  steadily  rowed  him  into  the  bank.  Now 
I  felt  better.  We  pushed  out  again,  and  this  time  I  could  feel 
that  bank  and  balcony  were  looking  at  us.  My  coach  did 
all  he  knew,  but  I  rowed  him  into  the  bank  again.     Goldie 

came  down  to  us  and  laughed  loudly  at .    They  let  me 

land,  and  I  was  glad  to,  for  I  was  "  all  in." 

So  began  my  rowing  experiences  at  Cambridge,  a  good  be- 
ginning. I  was  envied  of  many,  but  it  was  the  undoing  of  me, 
and  this  was  how  it  came  about.  My  college  happened  just 
then  to  be  very  short  of  tall,  likely  fellows  who  could  be  coached 
into  useful  oars  for  the  waist  of  the  boat,  i.  e.,  places  at  numbers 
four,  five,  and  six.    I  had  the  length  of  reach  and  strength  of 


1 14  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

loin.  I  was  taken  in  hand  at  once  and  given  number  five  in  a 
racing  eight.  In  that  boat  I  was  the  only  freshman,  the  rest  of 
the  crew  being  men  with  quite  an  experience  of  college  racing. 
They  knew  how  to  "sit  a  boat,"  as  the  saying  is;  I, of  course, did 
not.  Then  they  were  a  very  light  crew,  and  when  pushed  to  a 
fast  stroke  they  "rowed  light,"  as  old  oars  who  are  not  first- 
class  men  generally  do.  I  could  not  row  "light,"  even  if  I 
wanted  to,  which  I  didn't,  for  I  had  been  taught  that  not  to 
cover  your  blade  was  the  greatest  of  a  rowing  man's  faults. 
If  I  had  been  set  to  rowing  with  men  as  green  as  I  myself,  I 
really  think  I  should  in  time  have  made  a  good  oar.  As  it  was 
I  rowed  myself  out  with  a  light  crew  behind  me,  the  weight  of 
the  boat  coming  on  me  more  than  it  should  have  done.  And 
one  day  I  strained  my  back.  That  put  an  end  to  my  rowing 
for  my  first  October  term.  In  the  Lenten  term  next  year  I 
rowed  again.  I  kept  rowing  during  my  three  years  at  Cam- 
bridge, but  my  back  never  quite  helped  me  as  it  should,  and 
much  of  my  time  I  had  to  content  myself  with  coaching  college 
racing  crews. 

But  though  I  was  a  failure  as  an  oar,  rowing  did  me  good 
in  many  ways.  There  is  fierce  discipline  of  one's  will  in  rowing. 
This  may  sound  queer,  but  it  is  the  truth.  The  pain  and 
misery  of  learning  to  row  in  a  racing  boat  is  a  thing  that  no  man 
who  has  worked  his  way  up  till  he  is  a  good  oar  can  ever  forget. 
The  exhilaration  of  the  start  is  fine — the  thrilling  sense  of  life 
when,  all  the  eight  blades  dipped  together,  the  boat  shoots  for- 
ward as  a  living  thing.  But  soon  there  is  a  change.  It  is  half 
a  mile  or  more  before  you  get  your  second  wind,  and  a  sort  of 
feeling  of  uncertainty  possesses  the  boat  itself.  Then  if  the 
crew  are  an  even  lot,  and  in  good  training,  the  slogging  work  is 
not  so  bad.  Every  instant  is  a  call  on  every  ounce  of  strength 
you  have — and  then !  a  gradual  change :  extreme  weariness  grips 
you,  chest  heaving  and  muscles  aching,  every  bone  and  nerve 
,and  sinew  taxed  to  the  utmost — and/or  what?  "  I'll  never  do  it 
again,"  you  say  to  yourself;  .  .  .  "  Rowing  is  all  rot,"  .  .  . 
"meant  for  men  with  shorter  backs  than  mine,"  .  .  .  "can 
I  stand  it  till  we  reach  the  bridge?"  .  .  .  "Our  damned 
fool  of  a  cox  must  have  missed  bumping  the  crew  ahead,"  or 
"he  has  taken  all  the  life  out  of  the  boat  by  giving  us  too  much 
rudder  round  that  last  corner."    You  do  stand  it,  for  you  must 


CAMBRIDGE!  its 

stand  it.  Others  are  dependent  on  you.  At  last — Easy  all! 
and  you  are  at  rest.  Some  fellows  are  sick;  some  tumble  for- 
ward on  their  oars.  You  have  done  all  you  could;  perhaps  not 
what  was  expected  of  you,  and  if  so  with  great  plainness  of 
speech  this  is  explained  to  you  from  the  bank,  by  the  great  man 
who  has  honoured  you  by  riding  alongside  your  boat  for  the 
last  two  miles  as  you  rowed  the  course.  I'll  never  forget  how 
my  own  efforts  were  described  by  the  same  Olympian  G. 
"R.  does  his  best,  but  for  the  last  half  mile  he  looked  like  an 
agonized  worm."  The  description  was  not  flattering,  but  it 
was  accurate.  I  certainly  felt  like  it.  Of  course  this  is  not 
quite  an  everyday  experience,  but  I  do  not  exaggerate  it.  It 
is  an  experience  that  must  be  faced  again  and  again,  if  he 
would  become  an  "oar."  Pains  do  subside.  The  joy  of  con- 
test takes  you;  the  rush  of  the  boat;  the  sense  of  victorious 
strength  as  the  well-covered  blade  is  swept  through  the  re- 
sisting water;  and  the  feeling  of  unity  in  that  human  machine 
of  eight  young  springing  bodies  bent  on  Victory.  These  are 
memories  that  are  at  least  as  vivid  as  those  of  the  trials  that 
precede  them. 

There  may  seem  no  connection  between  these  experiences  of 
a  second-class  oar  and  experiences  making  for  success  in  after 
life,  but  I  am  certain  that  my  rowing,  though  sadly  shortened 
by  ill  luck,  was  a  real  help  to  me.  To  the  normal  man  there  is  a 
queer  but  actual  pleasure  in  doing  something  you  can  only 
just  do.  To  sip  that  nectar  of  the  gods  you  must  "train"  for 
the  boat  race,  or  the  sermon,  it  matters  not  which — you  must 
train.  In  cold,  raw,  unpleasant  March  days,  in  sultry  summer 
afternoons,  you  must  stick  it  out  and  train.  Then,  later,  Habit 
comes  imperceptibly  to  your  aid,  and  the  prize  you  are  striving 
for  she  helps  you  to  win ! 

Theodore  Waterhouse  had  told  me  three  years  before  that 
if  I  did  not  work  and  read  after  some  plan  I  would  amount 
to  little.  Since  then,  unexpected  things  had  made  planning 
difficult.  But  remembering  his  advice,  now  that  I  could  do 
as  I  wished  with  my  time,  I  acted  on  it.  I  rose  early,  at  six- 
thirty,  went  to  morning  chapel,  and  then  studied  for  my  next 
examinations  till  two  o'clock.  Those  hours  were  pure  grind. 
I  did  not  know  enough  of  the  classics  to  enjoy  them.  I  could 
not  afford  a  coach.     I  must  pass.     So  pass  I  did.     Two  very 


n6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

great  theologians  were  then  resident  lecturers,  Professors 
Westcott  and  Lightfoot.  Both  would  rank  to-day  as  emi- 
nently conservative.  Lightfoot  was  perhaps  the  more  forward 
looking  of  the  two,  and  I  attended  his  lectures  regularly.  He 
was  a  great  scholar;  afterward  he  became  a  great  bishop.  There 
was  a  kindly,  shy  brotherliness  about  him  that  captivated  one. 
He  invited  any  who  listened  to  him  to  come  to  his  rooms  and 
ask  questions,  so  I  took  him  at  his  word.  He  knew  I  was  no 
scholar,  but  had  I  been,  he  could  not  have  been  kinder.  He 
would  put  away  the  work  he  was  doing,  go  over  his  shelves, 
take  down  books,  find  for  me  an  appropriate  chapter  or  verse, 
make  me  sit  down  and  talk  to  him,  and  insist  on  my  coming 
again. 

When  I  left  college  I  could  pass  a  good  examination  in  any 
of  his  works  on  New  Testament  Greek. 

I  never  understood  why  our  Cambridge  Dons,  even  the 
greatest  of  them,  were  so  shy.  Few  were  public-school  men. 
Was  this  a  reason?  I  am  told  that  at  Oxford  the  Dons  and 
undergraduates  were  not  so  far  apart  as  we  were  at  Cambridge. 
I  can  see  now,  as  I  look  back,  that  Lightfoot's  teaching,  though 
it  dealt  mainly  with  the  critical  examination  of  the  text  of  St. 
Paul's  Epistles,  really  suggested,  yes,  demanded  of  the  scholar 
that  he  should  approach  the  problems  of  religion  from  newer 
and  more  scientific  points  of  view.  To  follow  his  line  of  thought 
necessitated  the  virtual  abandonment  of  much  that  both  high 
churchmen  and  low  churchmen  held  to  tenaciously:  (i)  man's 
religious  ideas  were  subject  to  and  were  influenced  by  the 
laws  of  growth;  in  other  words,  Christian  doctrine  was  an 
evolution;  (2)  Verbal  inspiration  therefore  could  no  longer  be 
defended  successfully;  (3)  With  unanswerable  learning,  he  re- 
futed the  claims  of  the  Episcopate  to  the  possession  of  an  exclusive 
ministerial  and  sacramental  gift.  In  short,  Apostolic  succession 
might  or  might  not  be  true  historically,  but  if  it  were  true,  a 
good  man  serving  God  and  his  fellows  in  the  Presbyterian, 
Methodist,  or  any  other  denomination  could  as  authoritatively 
preach  the  Gospel  and  administer  the  sacraments  as  could  the 
Archbishop  of  Canterbury  or  the  Pope  of  Rome. 

I  listened  carefully  to  all  he  said,  and  I  studied  his  writings, 
but  their  full  significance  did  not  come  to  me  till  long  years 
after.     I  did  not  see  then  that  the  revelation  of  God  to  man 


CAMBRIDGE  117 

was  not,  and  till  man  ceased  to  be  man,  never  could  be,  a 
finished  revelation,  its  record  bound  within  the  covers  of  one 
incomparably  great  book,  but  must  ever  be  a  continuous  proc- 
ess. Moreover,  that  revelation  must  be  continuously  made 
by  men  to  men,  and  not  by  one  man  only,  not  even  by  one 
Jesus  Christ,  but  by  many  men  in  many  nations,  and  in  many 
religions — the  Lord  Jesus  being  the  chief  of  God's  revealers, 
"the  chief  among  ten  thousand  and  the  altogether  lovely." 

Small  wonder  that  I  did  not  then  see  this,  for  it  is  only  here 
and  there  that  an  accredited  minister  in  any  Protestant  de- 
nomination yet  sees  this  axiomatic  truth.  But  a  short  time  ago 
to  preach  that  view  of  Jesus'  revelation  cost  a  man  summary 
trial  for  heresy  and  expulsion  from  any  orthodox  Christian 
church.  Let  me  say  here  that  in  1903  I  preached  it  as  well  as  I 
knew  how,  delivering  a  series  of  sermons  in  St.  Stephen's  P.  E. 
Church,  Philadelphia,  where  my  friend,  the  Rev.  Ellwood 
Worcester,  was  rector.  A  large  number  of  the  clergy  of  the 
diocese  headed  by  Rev.  Floyd  Tompkins  of  Trinity  Church, 
Philadelphia  (Phillips  Brooks's  old  church),  in  their  zeal  for 
orthodoxy  urged  the  Bishop  of  Pennsylvania  to  try  me  for 
heresy. 

The  old  sailor  loves  his  ship;  he  has  weathered  many  a  storm 
in  her,  and  she  has  carried  for  him  many  a  cargo.  He  believes 
in  wooden  ships.  None  of  your  iron  or  steel  death-traps  for 
him.  Creeds  and  dogmas  take  a  long  time  to  grow,  and  a  long 
time  to  die.  It  is  doubtful  if  the  most  effective  religious  teachers 
of  our  day  could  find  even  now  a  place  in  the  orthodox  pulpits 
of  our  land.  Certainly  Royce,  the  greatest  Christian  philos- 
opher Harvard  has  produced,  couldn't.  But  the  light  spreads: 
that  is  the  nature  of  light;  and  the  truth  grows  a  little  less  dim: 
that  is  the  nature  of  truth;  and  the  number  of  men  of  "good 
will"  is  increasing  in  our  old  world.  And  so  approaches  a 
better  day,  when  we  shall  be  judged  to  have  failed  or  succeeded 
in  our  life's  task,  in  so  far  as  we  have  failed  or  succeeded  in 
revealing  a  reasonable,  a  ruling,  and  a  lovable  God  to  those 
around  us — "A  power  not  ourselves  that  makes  for  righteous- 
ness." Once  the  Church  led  men  to  the  light.  To-day,  too 
commonly,  there  is  more  darkness  in  the  Church  than  in  the 
world  she  claims  to  lead  and  save. 

Through  the  "Backs"  the  Cam  winds  lazily,  water  plants 


u8  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

swaying  in  its  sluggish  current.  It  seems,  as  it  slowly  creeps 
along  between  lawns  that  have  been  rolled  and  mowed  for 
hundreds  of  years,  with  ancient  trees  on  either  side,  and  under 
buildings  of  warm-tinted  Elizabethan  brick,  to  be  doing  its  best 
to  free  itself  from  the  soilure  of  the  modern  town,  and  to  be- 
come, as  was  intended,  a  river  on  whose  banks  a  great  univer- 
sity might  fittingly  stand.  These  Cambridge  Backs  form  one 
of  the  most  beautiful  parks  in  England.  In  May-time  every 
linden  tree  and  hawthorn  bush  harbours  a  nightingale.  I 
counted  sixty-three  one  spring  morning,  each  bent  on  out- 
singing  his  neighbour.  In  the  modern  town  there  is  no  beauty 
and  but  few  good  buildings,  but  you  are  outside  it  in  a  short 
mile's  walking,  and  then  across  what  was  not  so  long  ago  the 
wide  fenland  to  westward  you  can  see  perhaps  the  finest  sun- 
sets in  England.  With  Wordsworth  in  my  pocket,  I  often  took 
that  westward  walk. 

There  was  a  good  deal  of  poverty  and  many  neglected 
children  in  Cambridge,  and  we  Evangelicals  organized  and 
maintained  a  rather  good  Sunday  School  at  Jesus  Lane.  I  had 
a  class  in  it. 

Till  my  second  year  at  Cambridge  no  girl  had  ever  cast  her 
eyes  on  me,  or  if  she  had,  I  was  none  the  wiser  for  it.  There 
was  a  small  fast  set  at  Cambridge  then,  but  they  did  not  amount 
to  much.  A  member  of  one  of  these  kept  a  very  pretty  girl 
in  a  cottage  some  distance  out  of  town.  In  the  middle  of  the 
May  term  King's  College  throws  open  its  gates  for  one  day  to 
the  University.  Then,  on  the  beautiful  lawns  surrounding 
Henry  VII's  chapel,  everybody  comes  to  look  at  everybody, 
and  everybody's  visiting  friends  and  relations.  King's  Day  is 
the  gala  day  of  the  year. 

I  was  strolling  among  the  crowd  when  I  caught  the  girl's 
eye  fixed  on  me,  and  in  spite  of  myself  I  returned  her  look. 
Hers  was  a  beautiful  and  not  a  bad  face.  I  felt  strangely 
disturbed  and  went  to  my  rooms.  Do  what  I  would,  I  could 
not  forget  her,  but  the  term  was  almost  over  and  in  a  few  days 
I  went  home.  I  had  had  no  girl  friends  in  my  life.  Boys  did 
not  make  girl  friends  then  in  England  as  they  do  now  in  the 
United  States.  Not  in  Dundalk  or  London  or  Mentone  had  I 
had  much  experience  of  their  society.  In  the  October  term 
following  I  met  her  again  face  to  face  on  King  Street.     I  al- 


CAMBRIDGE  119 

most  stopped,  and  so  did  she.  That  evening — it  was  a  full 
moon,  I  remember — I  went  down  the  road  where  her  cottage 
stood.  The  way  must  have  been  clear  for  her;  she  must  have 
been  expecting  me,  for  as  I  drew  near  the  door  slowly  opened 
and  a  hand  was  waved  to  me.  My  heart  stood  still.  I  felt 
myself  sway  as  I  walked.  I  was  present  with  the  thing  I  sought; 
it  was  offered  me;  and  take  it  I  could  not.  I  walked  on.  Then 
my  blood  was  too  much  for  me,  and  I  came  opposite  her  door 
again.  It  stood  half  open  still.  Then  I  passed  by  once  more 
and  walked  and  walked,  I  don't  know  where  or  for  how  long. 
I  did  not  sleep  till  morning,  but  I  won  out  that  night.  I  never 
kissed  a  woman's  lips  till  I  kissed  the  girl  that  married  me; 
that  was  seven  years  later.  If  I  had  been  beaten  that  night, 
I  know  I  would  have  been  a  ruined  man.  Some  will  say:  why 
put  a  trivial  thing  like  this  in  your  story?  I  do  so  not  for  the 
sake  of  bragging,  God  knows,  but  because  it  may  help  some 
young  man  in  his  dark  hour.  I  have  been  honoured,  during 
my  life,  with  the  confidences  of  very  many.  I  "speak  that  I 
do  know"  when  I  say  all  life's  future  depends  on  the  first  battle 
with  passion. 

For  in  the  morn  and  liquid  dew  of  youth, 
Contagious  blastments  are  most  imminent. 

A  man  should  go  clean-bodied  and  taintless  to  the  arms  of 
his  love,  the  mother  of  his  children.  The  old  Evangelical  creed 
of  my  childhood  did  so  much  for  me.  This  is  no  impossible 
ideal  for  boy  or  man.  The  struggle  against  impurity  is  hardest 
at  the  very  beginning.  Win  then,  and  victory  comes  easier 
with  each  year.  But  once  begin  to  sin,  and  few  stop  sinning. 
I  was  much  alone  in  the  succeeding  years.  Few  knew  me,  my 
steps  were  unmarked.  I  was  often  thrown  into  the  company 
of  attractive  women,  and  sometimes  the  ways  of  pleasure  stood 
wide  open.  But  never  again  had  I  to  face  the  fierceness  and 
the  pain  of  the  struggle  I  went  through  that  autumn  night  at 
Cambridge. 

My  Cambridge  life  seems  unsatisfactory  as  I  look  back  on  it. 
I  did  not  find  in  it  what  I  hoped  to  find.  I  worked  hard  and 
alone,  and  made  few  friends,  and  these  I  lost  when  I  left  the 
Church  of  England  and  came  to  the  United  States. 

While  at  Cambridge,  I  worked  in  Bethnal  Green  a  good  deal 


120  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

during  vacations,  and  was  very  happy  in  it.  Those  I  knew 
there  were  no  slackers,  no  fair-day  workers.  They  were  giving 
their  all,  the  best  they  had,  to  the  best  they  knew.  They  could 
say  with  Paul,  "This  one  thing  I  do,"  and  none  who  have  grace 
to  stand  on  that  ground  with  the  great  Apostle  can  ever  lack  for 
power  with  their  fellow-men,  no  matter  what  gospel  they 
preach.  But,  as  I  see  now,  the  very  nature  and  scope  of  the 
gospel  we  held  and  taught  tended  to  weaken  and  isolate  us. 
It  was  a  purely  individualistic  message  we  delivered;  good  as 
far  as  it  went,  but  it  did  not  go  far  enough;  half  of  a  great  truth, 
but  only  half,  Save  your  soul  alive:  this  the  one  thing  worth 
doing.  Jesus'  religion  as  we  held  it  went  no  further.  Preach- 
ing that  in  season  and  out  of  season,  talking  ever  and  always 
about  it  as  we  did,  never  sitting  next  a  stranger  in  the  omnibus 
or  railroad  car  without  talking  it,  never  dining  at  a  friend's 
table  and  leaving  it  out — I  don't  exaggerate — this  was  the 
steadily  pursued  habit  of  a  considerable  body  of  able  and  earnest 
men  at  the  time  I  am  speaking  of.  Literally  an  "  in  season  and 
out  of  season"  appeal  "whether  they  would  hear  or  whether 
they  would  forbear,"  and  it  meant  a  power.  But  this  sort 
of  religious  zeal,  these  methods  of  religious  activity,  made 
naturally  for  Individualism.  What  we  needed,  though  no 
power  on  earth  could  have  induced  us  to  take  the  medicine, 
was  a  good  dose  of  Darwin:  something  to  make  us  under- 
stand a  little  of  the  cause  of  things.  What  we  failed  to  see  was 
that  men  and  women  who  came  of  tainted  stock,  conceived  in 
sin  and  cradled  in  dirt,  not  educated  to  the  inevitable  things  in 
life,  or  educated  wrongly,  could  not  get  saved  at  all.  Matthew 
Arnold,  with  his  unequalled  critical  perspicacity,  says  of  Words- 
worth, whom  he  placed  among  the  very  great: 

But  Wordsworth's  eyes  avert  their  ken 
From  half  of  human  fate 

Wordsworth  idealized  Nature.  In  other  words,  he  saw  half  of 
things  as  he  wished  to  see  them,  not  as  they  actually  were;  and 
that  is  what  the  majority  of  even  the  best  of  us  have  ever  been 
inclined  to  do.  We  try  to  make  our  little  schemes  account 
for  the  facts  of  life,  and  when  we  fail,  we  cheerfully  and  fatally 
reverse  Nature's  order;  rather  than  change  or  give  up  our 


CAMBRIDGE  121 

scheme,  we  dodge  the  facts;  we  adapt  environment  to  organism 
rather  than  organism  to  environment. 

Men  like  my  friends  Herbert  Watney  and  Fred  Charring- 
ton,  who  had  given  up  wealth  and  friends  in  order  to  preach  the 
Gospel  as  they  saw  it;  General  Booth,  then  beginning  to  or- 
ganize his  splendid  Salvation  Army  of  the  future;  a  few  de- 
voted high  churchmen,  who  exalted  their  priestly  office,  aim- 
ing thereby  to  help  and  save  the  lost;  the  University  clergy 
and  soap-box  ranters — all  of  us  made  the  same  mistake,  and 
most  are  making  it  still.  We  declared  that  Religion  has  to  do 
with  the  supernatural.  Some  say  a  supernatural  Bible,  others 
a  supernatural  Church,  still  others  a  supernatural  miracle 
worker.  The  first  says  he  is  God's  prophet,  the  second,  God's 
priest,  the  third,  God's  healer — all  trying  to  make  men  believe 
that  God  will  do  something,  or  help  them  to  do  something, 
supernaturally,  if  they  but  pray  earnestly  enough  and  believe 
firmly  enough.  Anything  with  a  hint  of  the  supernatural  is, 
according  to  the  orthodox,  a  diviner  thing  than  the  merely 
natural;  a  supernatural  way  a  holier  way  than  a  natural.  So  a 
supernaturally  working  God  is  proclaimed,  and  that  means  a 
ghostly,  changing,  and  unreal  God.  For,  at  the  long  last, 
man  is  face  to  face  with  the  inescapable  truth  that  there  is  no 
such  thing  as  the  finally  supernatural  at  all. 

The  supernatural  of  a  mid-African  nigger  or  of  the  Pope  of 
Rome  is  only  the  word  each  of  them  applies  to  that  shifting  point 
where  his  knowledge  of  the  actual  ends  and  his  yearning  to  know  is 
balked. 


CHAPTER  X 

Norwich,  First  Cure  of  Souls 

7"  would  retemper  the  individual  life  through  communion  with  the 
Universal  Life.  I  would  dive  into  the  midst  of  present  things  in  order 
to  draw  inspiration  from  them.  I  would  mingle  with  men  in  order  to 
draw  strength  from  them. — Mazzini. 

In  December,  i  873, 1  went  up  to  Norwich  to  take  the  Bishop's 
examination  for  deacon's  orders.  I  knew  a  little  about  the 
field  of  work,  but  nothing  about  my  future  bishop  or  my  rec- 
tor. As  matters  turned  out  I  was  extraordinarily  fortunate  in 
both.  If  I  had  hunted  all  England  over,  I  could  not  have 
found  kinder  or  wiser  friends  and  counsellors  than  they  proved 
to  be  to  me. 

Rumour  said  that  the  Rt.  Rev.  the  Hon.  John  Thomas 
Pelham,  Bishop  of  Norwich,  insisted  that  postulants  should 
pass  an  unusually  searching  examination,  and  I  presented  my- 
self at  the  Palace  with  trepidation.  I  hated  examinations,  and 
this  one  worse  than  any  preceding  it,  for  you  could  not  tell 
what  awaited  you,  or  what  you  would  be  examined  in.  The 
Bishop's  examining  chaplain  was  a  well-known  Cambridge 
Don,  a  fine  scholar,  a  deeply  religious  man,  and  a  gentleman. 
So  much  was  comforting.  I  expected  to  find  a  room  in  some 
hotel,  but  on  calling  at  the  Palace  the  butler  informed  me  that 
my  room  was  ready,  and  that  all  the  candidates  were  the 
Bishop's  guests. 

A  very  ancient  house  a  little  modernized  was  the  Palace.  It 
stood  under  the  shadow  of  the  spire,  the  loftiest  but  one  in 
England,  and  all  round  it  was  an  old-fashioned  flower 
garden,  with  yew  trees  and  spreading  lawns.  Much  of  the 
early  work  on  the  Cathedral  was  Norman,  and  this  part  of 
the  great  church  stood  out  splendidly,  firm  and  grim.  The 
city  wall  hugged  the  Cathedral  and  its  attendant  buildings 
closely.     Norwich  Cathedral  is  somewhat  out  of  the  line  of 

122 


NORWICH,  FIRST  CURE  OF  SOULS  123 

sight-seeing  travel,  but  after  Durham,  Winchester,  and  York, 
to  my  mind  it  is  the  best  thing  architecturally  in  England.  Its 
setting  in  the  spacious  gardens,  closed  in  by  old  flint-faced 
fourteenth-century  walls,  is  especially  fine. 

Nothing  was  left  undone  by  the  Bishop  to  make  his  would- 
be  clergy  feel  at  home.  We  all  sat  at  his  table,  in  an  old, 
wainscoted  dining  room;  he,  a  tall,  very  aristocratic-looking 
old  man,  but  most  gracious  and  fatherly;  a  Peer  of  the 
English  realm  if  you  will,  but  a  true  and  watchful  shepherd 
of  the  human  flock  over  whom  he  had  been  set  as  overseer.  So 
he  seemed  to  me,  that  first  evening  I  met  him.  In  the  drawing 
room  after  dinner  he  and  Mrs.  Pelham  tried  to  draw  our 
heterogeneous  units  together,  but  naturally  we  were  a  difficult 
lot — about  fifteen  of  us.  Family  prayers  soon  followed  in  the 
great  hall,  all  the  servants  joining,  the  Bishop  giving  out  a  hymn 
and  leading  the  singing.  After  reading  the  Scripture  he 
prayed.  He  had  a  delightful  and  original  way  of  praying. 
He  laid  the  whole  Prayer-Book  under  contribution  for  prayers 
and  bits  of  prayers.  He  drew  them  out  from  anywhere  and 
from  everywhere  as  he  needed  them,  as  only  a  spiritual  artist 
and  a  saint  could  do;  and  then  at  times,  simply  as  a  father  with 
his  children,  he  would  lead  us  in  extempore  prayer. 

I  was  to  spend  many  evenings  in  that  ancient  Palace  of 
Norwich,  stately  and  gray  in  its  exterior  but  warmed  with 
a  consistent  Christian  kindliness  that  blessed  both  the  giver 
and  receiver.  The  Bishop  of  Norwich  was  the  first  great 
ecclesiastic  I  had  ever  met,  and  he  made  a  profound  impression 
on  me.  He  seemed  to  me  a  real  "Father  in  God,"  after  the 
beautiful  old  phrase.  He  was  a  sound  scholar;  not  a  great 
preacher;  but  I  never  anywhere  met  a  man  who  impressed  me 
as  living  nearer  to  God,  or  one  who  more  utterly  gave  all  he  had 
and  all  he  was  to  the  service  of  his  fellow-men.  Since  those  days 
I  have  known  many  bishops  and  many  examining  chaplains, 
but  I  have  never  had  experience  of  any  methods  of  testing  a 
candidate's  fitness  for  the  ministry  that  was  so  natural,  so  in- 
formal, yet  so  searching,  as  was  this  first  experience  of  my  own. 
The  spaciousness  and  quiet  of  the  old  Cathedral  town  helped, 
of  course,  the  plan.  In  the  crush  and  hurry  of  a  great  city  it 
would  have  been  harder  to  accomplish.  But  those  quiet 
days  in  the  golden  autumn  weather,  with  their  walks  and  talks 


i24  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

when  the  long  hours  of  examination  were  over,  I  never  can 
forget,  nor  can  I  ever  cease  to  be  thankful  for  them. 

As  to  the  examinations  themselves,  I  did  quite  extraordinarily 
badly.  I  never  could  write  Latin  prose,  and  with  that  exception 
most  of  our  examination  was  oral,  and  I  was  no  good  at  that, 
either.  I  made  every  mistake  a  man  not  an  utter  fool  could 
make,  and  all  hope  of  being  admitted  deacon  just  then,  I  gave 
up.  When  the  chaplain  had  finished  with  us,  each  went  to 
spend  some  time  alone  with  the  Bishop  in  his  study.  When 
my  turn  came,  I  was  so  really  discouraged  and  upset  that  I 
scarcely  knew  what  I  was  saying.  The  dear  man  was  very 
gentle  with  me.  "Mr.  Rainsford,"  said  he,  "you  have  done 
unusually  poorly.  I  cannot  quite  understand  why.  Will  you 
now  repeat  to  me  the  Apostles'  Creed?"  I  began,  stammering, 
the  Nicene.  And  that  I  could  not  repeat  correctly.  He 
stopped  me,  gently!  Not  one  harsh  word!  He  saw  I  wasn't 
master  of  my  nerves.  "I  make  enquiries,"  said  he,  "about 
my  candidates,  before  they  come  here  for  ordination,  and  of 
you  I  have  heard  things  I  like.  If  I  now  admit  you  to  deacon's 
orders,  will  you  promise  me  that  during  this  next  year  you  will 
work  hard,  not  only  in  your  parish  but  at  your  books,  so  that 
when  you  seek  'Priests,'  I  may  know  that  I  have  not  made  a 
mistake  now,  in  spite  of  your  failure,  in  admitting  you  to  the 
Deaconite."  I  could  not  answer  him,  but  I  looked  my  grati- 
tude, and  I  loved  and  honoured  John  Thomas,  Bishop  of  Nor- 
wich, as  a  Father  in  God. 

In  December,  1874,  I  went  up  for  my  Priests,  and  once 
again  in  the  same  study  stood  alone  before  my  dear  Bishop. 
"You  have  not  failed  yourself,  nor  disproved  my  opinion  of 
you.  You  have  passed  an  excellent  examination.  I  am 
pleased  with  you,  and  thankful  that  a  year  ago  I  took  the 
unusual  course  I  did." 

So  I  went  from  Cambridge  straight  into  Orders  without  any 
seminary  training.  I  had  no  segregation  in  the  artificial  at- 
mosphere of  a  theological  college.  I  am  glad  of  it,  and  with 
the  dim  hope  that  some  of  our  bishops  may  be  influenced  a 
little  by  what  I  say  I  stress  the  point  again.  Our  bishops  have 
wide  power;  they  can  really  select  and  ordain  any  man  they  choose. 
The  Episcopate  was  twice  a  possibility  for  me.  That,  of  course, 
was  in  the  early  days  of  my  ministry,  before  I  had  had  time  to 


NORWICH,  FIRST  CURE  OF  SOULS  125 

say  or  do  anything  in  particular,  and  before  I  was  tagged  a 
heretic.  And  it  was  just  this  one  splendid  power  resident  in 
the  office  that  appealed  to  me.  "Oh,  Fathers  in  God,  for  pity's 
sake  let  some  men  into  the  depleted  ranks  of  clergy  who  cannot,  will 
not,  should  not,  become  Theologs."  Many  good  fellows  get  on 
the  wrong  track  as  soon  as  they  become  Theologs.  They  feel 
they  are  not  quite  as  other  students  are,  and  alas !  other  students 
feel  just  the  same  about  them.  Their  views  of  life,  of  duty, 
of  sin,  of  the  world,  of  things  you  may  and  may  not  do,  are  the 
views  of  the  Theolog.  Life  for  them  "is  sicklied  o'er  with  a 
pale  cast  of  thought."  The  seminary  is  not  the  university,  and 
it  is  not  the  world,  and  when  men  come  out  of  it  they  may 
find  they  have  paid  too  big  a  price  for  the  only  thing  they  got 
there — a  little  doubtful  theology.  A  witty  friend  of  mine 
once  asked,  "Why  are  theological  seminaries  like  Aaron's 
mysterious  fire?  Because,  like  Aaron,  you  put  in  gold  and 
there  came  out  this  calf."     (Ex.  xxxii;  24.) 

The  Church  is  out  of  touch  with  much,  oh,  so  much,of  what  is 
best  in  the  modern  world,  and  for  this  calamitous  fact  the 
separating  education  of  the  clergy  is  largely  responsible. 

When  I  have  an  attack  of  the  "blues"  I  find  myself  some- 
times wondering  if  I  was  right  in  seeking  ordination,  and  en- 
tering the  ministry  of  the  national  Church  of  England.  I  was 
in  many  ways  unfitted  for  the  clerical  profession  as  it  was  and 
still  is  popularly  conceived  of.  Any  one  can  see  this  who  has 
followed  my  story.  At  the  time  I  did  not  realize  this,  but  how 
often  do  any  of  us  realize  what  we  are  binding  ourselves  to 
when  we  enter  any  profession?  A  sense  of  my  unfitness  has 
constantly  grown  on  me.  Yet,  by  the  time  one  has  gauged 
one's  powers  or  lack  of  powers,  gauged  the  varying  brakes  and 
obstructions,  some  of  them  almost  intolerable,  on  freedom  of 
speech  or  of  action,  incidental  to  a  clergyman's  life,  there  has 
arisen  to  balance  it  a  sense  of  the  loss  and  hurt  to  others  any 
surrender  of  that  calling  must  entail.  I  suppose  it  must  ever 
be  so.  I  suppose  we  cannot  work  as  free  men  under  complex 
social  conditions  any  more  than  we  can  as  naked  men;  that 
conventions  of  necessity  bind  us  on  every  side  and  in  every 
relation  of  life. 

But  of  this  I  am  sure:  that  easier,  freer,  more  natural  ways 
must  be  found  within  my  own  church  and  all  churches  for  the 


126  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

using  of  men  and  women  eminently  fitted  to  instruct  and  stimu- 
late their  fellows,  specially  those  called  to  preach,  without  the 
hampering  imposition  of  old  and  irrelevant  doctrinal  tests 
and  creeds.  To-day,  the  tragedy  of  it  is,  the  little  fellows  get 
in>  and  the  larger  stay  out.  Consequently,  the  clergy  of  all  the 
Protestant  churches  are  steadily  losing  the  influence  they  once 
had. 

My  rector,  William  Nottage  Ripley,  lived  at  Earlham  Hall, 
three  miles  outside  the  town.  I  was  to  stay  with  him  till  I 
secured  a  lodging  in  the  parish.  When  I  got  out  of  the  train  at 
Norwich  station  there  was  no  carriage  to  meet  me,  and  for  the 
first  time  I  learned  how  far  away  Earlham  was.  I  left  my 
small  baggage  at  the  depot  and  walked  out.  I  had  not  met 
either  my  rector  or  his  wife,  and  this  did  not  seem  a  very  hope- 
ful beginning.  I  had  got  about  two  miles  on  my  way  when, 
on  the  straight  empty  road,  I  saw  a  lady  walking  at  a  fast  pace 
to  meet  me.  Right  up  to  me  she  came,  holding  out  both  hands 
— that  was  ever  her  way — and  saying,  "  I  know  you  are  our  new 
curate.  Dear!  it  was  too  bad  the  coachman  had  so  many 
things  to  do,"  (that  meant,  as  I  soon  got  to  know,  that  that 
faithful  old  family  piece  had  to  call  with  chicken  broth  here, 
take  a  pat  of  butter  there,  and  a  little  something  good  some- 
where else,  and  these,  his  beloved  mistress's  commands,  were  the 
first  charge  on  his  time,  let  trains  and  curates  come  and  go  as 
they  might)  "he  missed  the  train  altogether."  How  she  knew 
me  I  don't  know,  but  soon  I  came  to  have  absolute  and  de- 
lightful confidence  in  her  loving  intuitions.  She  was  quite  a 
great  lady,  was  Mrs.  Ripley, 

And  works  of  week-day  holiness 

Fell  from  her  noiseless  as  the  snow, 

Nor  had  she  ever  learned  to  know 
That  aught  was  easier  than  to  bless. 

She  loved  me  and  believed  in  me  and  mothered  me.  She  had 
been  a  beautiful  woman,  and  still  retained  the  sweet  graces  and 
energy  of  her  youth.  Hers  was  a  charity  that  never  thought 
evil  till  it  had  to,  for  she  was  of  a  keen  and  discerning  spirit. 
Enthusiastic  when  she  gave  her  friendship,  yet  not  so  blinded 
by  it  that  she  was  not  the  wisest  and  frankest  of  critics.  Cul- 
tured in  her  tastes,  with  an  ample  income,  she  and  her  husband 


NORWICH,  FIRST  CURE  OF  SOULS  127 

made  Earlham,  to  those  privileged  to  visit  it,  a  home  to  re- 
member. 

Earlham  was  an  Early  Georgian  manor  house,  spreading  into 
a  semicircle  on  either  wing,  offering  an  unpretentious  frontage 
to  the  north,  but  having  an  ample  southern  face,  covered  with 
the  longest  wisteria  in  England,  and  Gloire  de  Dijon  roses  in- 
numerable. It  was  full  of  odd  corners  and  unexpected  stair- 
ways, and  no  one  ever  seemed  to  know  how  many  bedrooms 
there  were  in  it,  there  always  being  an  extra  one  for  the  most 
unexpected  guest. 

Here,  when  the  full  day's  work  was  over  on  Sunday,  I  came  to 
rest;  here  encouragement,  wise  counsel,  and  unfailing  love  were 
ever  given  me.  Had  ever  a  curate  a  happier  introduction  to 
his  work?  At  Earlham  I  saw  what  a  rector's  house  should  be. 
I  there  resolved  that  if  ever  I  had  young  clergy  to  direct,  I 
would  try  to  be  intimate  with  them,  try  to  understand  them, 
making  them  feel  that  they  were  not  merely  my  juniors,  my 
"nethanim,"  the  "hewers  of  wood  and  drawers  of  water," 
mere  parish  drudges,  assistants  to  be  drilled  and  ordered 
about;  but  my  younger  brothers  who  had  a  claim  on  all  I  was 
and  all  I  knew.  It  is  a  strange  and  a  sad  fact  that  but  few 
popular  clergy  make  a  success  of  it  with  their  assistants.  Yet 
no  opportunity  for  the  accomplishment  of  lasting  good  can  life 
offer  to  any  man  greater  than  that  of  choosing  the  right  sort  of 
clergy  to  assist  him,  and  inspiring  as  well  as  superintending  the 
opening  years  of  their  lives.  The  parish,  rather  than  the 
seminary,  should  be  the  true  training  ground  for  the  younger 
clergy. 

My  first  sermon  in  St.  Giles',  preached  to  a  crowd,  for  every- 
one turned  out  to  hear  the  new  curate,  was,  as  all  my  first  ser- 
mons have  been,  a  failure.  It  was  so  in  Bethnal  Green,  so  in 
St.  Giles',  so  in  Holy  Trinity,  42nd  Street,  New  York,  and  so 
on.  I  had,  from  the  beginning  of  my  ministry,  made  up  my 
mind  not  to  read  my  sermon.  My  best  and  wisest  friends 
often  urged  me  to  read  at  least  one  sermon  a  week,  but  I  am 
sure  my  determination  was  well  taken.  Yielding  to  them,  I 
did  on  occasions  carefully  write  my  sermon  in  full  and  read  it. 
When  I  did  so  I  felt  a  loss  of  power.  I  could  not  grip  my 
audience.  That  first  evening  in  my  new  field,  after  preaching, 
I  walked  out  to  Earlham  with  my  dear  lady.     I  had  done 


128  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

my  very  best  by  my  sermon,  had  thought  out  carefully  things 
I  wanted  to  say,  and  arranged  them  in  the  order  in  which  I 
wanted  to  say  them,  condensing  the  subject  matter  into  several 
pages  of  notes,  which  I  took  into  the  pulpit.  All  in  vain.  I  for- 
got what  I  had  in  mind,  and  was  too  nervous  to  read  my  mem- 
oranda, and  stumbled  and  mixed  things  up  sadly.  Naturally 
I  felt  discouraged,  for  I  was  sure  my  kind  rector  must  have 
been  disappointed  in  me. 

I  remember  we  walked  quite  a  long  way  in  silence.  Then 
she,  reading  my  thought,  took  my  arm  for  a  moment  and  said  to 
me,  as  though  I  were  her  son:  "Do  not  be  disheartened,  dear. 
God  has  called  you  to  preach  to  men." 

I  began  a  strenuous  life  in  Norwich.  I  lived  in  a  tiny  house, 
owned  by  a  little  old  lady  who  was  kindly  attentive  to  all 
my  wants,  and  was  cleanliness  itself.  I  rose  at  six,  and  read 
my  Greek  Testament  with  the  best  commentaries  I  could  find, 
for  a  couple  of  hours  before  breakfast;  and  I  formed  the  habit 
of  reading  while  dressing,  committing  to  memory  a  few  lines  of 
good  poetry.  This  habit  I  kept  up  till  I  was  sixty,  and  I  try  to 
keep  to  it  still. 

After  breakfast  on  Tuesday  morning  I  immediately  at- 
tacked my  sermon  for  the  coming  Sunday.  Mondays,  unless 
some  emergency  call  sounded,  I  took  for  myself. 

My  father,  when  he  bade  me  good-bye,  gave  me  a  piece  of 
advice  for  which  I  can  never  be  thankful  enough,  and  which  I 
have  handed  on  to  many  others,  I  hope  with  profit  to  some  of 
them:  "You  are  going  all  your  life  to  have  much  speaking  and 
teaching  to  do.  Give  every  single  morning  in  the  week,  if 
necessary,  to  preparing  as  thoroughly  as  you  can  one  discourse. 
Do  that,  and  you  will  never  run  dry,  even  if  you  have  to  speak 
somewhere  every  day." 

I  have  proved  the  wisdom  of  my  father's  advice.  Enrich 
your  mind  persistently  on  one  subject,  and  you  have  a  sense  of 
security  in  speaking.  Better  far  repeat  a  subject  several  times, 
if  necessary,  than  fall  back  on  unprepared  stuff.  If  you  have 
anything  to  say,  your  listeners  do  not  object  to  having  it  re- 
peated to  them  more  than  once.  They  grow  wearied  only 
when  you  have  nothing  to  say.  The  fine  old  Greek  proverb 
always  holds  true:    "A  good  thing  will  bear  repeating." 

My  Sunday  work  began  early  and  lasted  till  late  at  night. 


NORWICH,  FIRST  CURE  OF  SOULS  129 

Early  Communion  at  eight,  Sunday  School  at  nine-thirty;  at 
eleven,  morning  prayers  and  sermon.  I  preached  on  alternate 
Sundays  with  my  rector.  Afternoon  services  and  sermon  at 
four-thirty  I  always  took.  Evening  prayers  and  sermon  at 
seven-thirty,  which  I  took  alternately  with  the  rector.  Later, 
another  service  was  added  of  which  I  shall  tell.  I  was  for- 
tunate indeed  in  having  William  Ripley  as  my  first  rector.  In 
his  own  wise,  loving,  gentle  way,  he  advised  my  making  cer- 
tain rules  for  my  clerical  life.  "To  be  effective,  you  must  work 
on  schedule;  have  a  daily  rule  and  keep  to  it."  If  you  do  not 
have  a  system,  trifles  will  demoralize  and  defeat  you.  How 
many  good  men  have  I  known  who  were  busy  all  the  time 
and  accomplished  little  of  worth.  Specially  he  insisted  on 
visiting,  steady,  constant  visiting;  and  he  was  right.  The  only 
way  to  know  your  people,  the  only  way  to  reach  into  their  lives 
in  order  to  help,  and  so  the  very  best  way  to  get  the  right 
sort  of  sermons  to  preach  to  them,  and  illustrations  to  make 
your  sermons  clear  and  interesting,  is  to  visit.  All  who  suc- 
ceed as  visitors  of  their  flock  cannot  preach.  But  the  man 
who  can  preach  will  very  greatly  increase  the  influence  he  wields 
in  the  pulpit  if  he  forces  himself  to  visit,  not  his  pet  parishion- 
ers alone,  but  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  people  in  his  parish; 
not  alone  the  old  ladies  that  adore  him,  but  the  hard-headed 
men  who  fight  shy  of  him.  The  clergy  do  not  visit  any  longer 
as  much  as  they  did  forty  years  ago.  Among  my  own  as- 
sistants at  St.  George's,  I  found  at  times  a  disinclination  to 
face  its  drudgery.  But  I  never  knew  a  young  cleric  yet  who 
faithfully  persisted  in  this  duty  who  was  not  greatly  the  gainer 
thereby. 

I  must  digress  for  a  little  to  explain  the  Church  of  England's 
position  in  the  old  city  of  Norwich  with  its  85,000  people. 
There  were  more  than  forty  such  churches  within  the  ancient 
walls  (St.  Giles'  stood  outside),  some  of  these  were  almost 
empty  and  some  were  quite  empty,  and  it  was  difficult  to 
secure  the  attendance  of  two  parishioners  who  were  com- 
municants; so  difficult  indeed  that  the  Holy  Communion 
could  not  be  administered  in  them  oftener  than  once  or  twice 
in  the  year.  Several  of  the  oldest  of  these  churches  were,  in 
my  time,  University  "livings."  Now  the  University  "living," 
however  well  the  plan  may  have  worked  long  ago,  had  become 


r3o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

often  little  less  than  a  scandal  in  later  days.  Celibacy  was 
still  enforced  by  the  two  great  Universities  on  their  resident 
clerical  Dons.  While  they  were  teaching  they  must  not 
marry.  As  soon  as  a  living  in  the  College's  gift  fell  vacant,  it 
was  automatically  offered  to  the  senior  resident  Don.  He, 
poor  man,  had  for  long  years  been  looking  forward  to  the  day 
when  at  last  a  college  living  with  income  sufficient  to  live  on 
should  be  open  to  him.  History  doth  not  tell  of  any  Dons 
promoted  from  those  college  livings  of  Cambridge.  Those 
who  held  them  were  slow  to  die.  So  the  net  result  was,  these 
city  churches,  which  were  intended  doubtless  by  those  good 
men  who  founded  them  to  be  centres  of  light  and  leading,  came 
to  be  ruled  by  a  succession  of  very  elderly  Cambridge  Dons, 
who  once,  long  ago,  had  been  great  in  some  field  of  learning,  but 
were  as  incapable  as  honest  men  well  could  be  of  successfully 
filling  the  role  of  City  Rector.  Thus  a  rule  that  had  once 
worked  well  was  allowed  to  become  a  cause  of  pathetic  scandal 
both  to  the  University  and  the  Church. 

Any  Cambridge  man  of  my  time  will  remember  Betsey  R 

I  will  not  give  his  surname;  it  is  not  necessary.     Betsey  R 

was  an  extraordinarily  dried-up  old  gentleman,  or  so  he  seemed 
to  our  unsympathetic  youth  who  had  to  endure  his  murderous 
way  of  reading  morning  prayers  at  chapel  through  his  nose. 

Betsey  R was  patient;  he  had  waited  long;  he  must  have 

been  almost  seventy  when  I  knew  him,  but  he  had,  as  most  of 
the  Dons  who  were  in  like  condition,  made  his  choice  of  a 
maiden  years  before  who  had  also  agreed  to  be  patient.  To- 
gether they  waited  till  the  obstinately  healthy  incumbent  of 
the  living  he  longed  for  finally  gave  up  the  ghost.  As  soon 
as  he  did,  Betsey  was  inducted,  and  married  to  his  elderly  lady 
in  short  order.  We  heartless  youths,  rejoicing  in  his  absence, 
had  made  careful  inquiries  as  to  the  date  of  his  entrance  on  the 
duties  of  parish  priest.  His  little  country  church  was  some 
miles  outside  the  town,  but  on  that  first  Sunday  morning 

Betsey  R looked  us  full  in  the  face  as  he  again  murdered 

the  service,  and  well  rewarded  us  for  our  long  walk  by  request- 
ing the  congregation,  when  the  proper  place  in  prayers  was 
reached,  "to  join  with  him  in  returning  thanks  to  Almighty 
God  for  three  weeks'  uninterrupted  connubial  bliss."1 

1  Absolutely  true. 


NORWICH,  FIRST  CURE  OF  SOULS  131 

One  of  the  most  brilliant  mathematicians  Cambridge  had 
produced  came  in  this  way  to  be  rector  of  a  little  old  church  in 

a  poor  part  of  the  town.     Mr. was  a  curiosity  and  a  wit. 

One  Sunday  in  the  year  he  had  a  well-filled  church.  It  was  the 
twenty-first  Sunday  after  Trinity,  because  he  then  convulsed 
the  younger  part  of  his  audience  by  the  liberty  he  took  in  read- 
ing the  third  chapter  of  Daniel,  the  first  lesson  for  that  day. 
In  that  chapter  occurs  the  passage,  "At  what  time  ye  hear  the 
sound  of  the  cornet,  flute,  harp,  sackbut,  psaltery,  dulcimer 
and  all  kinds  of  music,  ye  fall  down  and  worship  the  golden 
image  that  Nebuchadnezzar  the  King  hath  setAip."  This  list 
of  instruments  is  repeated  three  times  in  the  course  of  the  chap- 
ter. The  first  time  he  would  read  it  as  it  was  written,  but 
afterward  he  substituted  for  it  the  phrase,  "the  aforesaid 
gentlemen  with  the  brass  band." 

Once  a  year  there  was  a  collection  for  the  choir.  His  wife 
was  a  competent  organist  and  choir  leader,  and  in  its  own  way 
the  music  was  not  bad.  I  had  at  the  time  a  large  following 
among  the  poor  people  and  he  invited  me  to  preach  the  sermon. 
The  pulpit  was  a  very  narrow  black  oak  box.  The  choir  sat 
immediately  underneath  the  pulpit  in  an  immense  square  pew, 
surrounded  by  a  rail,  along  which  ran  a  heavy  old  red  baize 
curtain.  As  soon  as  the  singing  was  over  and  I  entered  the 
pulpit,  one  of  the  choir  rose  and  noisily  drew  the  curtain  right 
round  the  three  open  sides  of  the  pew.  Then  he  seated  himself 
beside  one  of  the  girls,  and  putting  his  arm  round  her  waist, 
drew  her  head  down  on  his  shoulder.  She  made  no  sort  of 
objection,  and  he  kept  it  there.  Then  he  looked  up  straight 
into  my  face  and  winked.    This  was  too  much.    So  I  walked  out 

of  the  pulpit  and  across  the  chancel  to  where  Doctor was 

seated.  I  said,  "Your  choir  are  behaving  outrageously  behind 
that  curtain.  I  cannot  go  on  with  my  sermon  till  it  is  stopped." 
The  Doctor's  answer  was  as  prompt  as  could  be.  He  rose, 
walked  up  to  the  square  pew,  tore  the  whole  rotten  baize  cur- 
tain away  with  a  jerk,  exposing  the  disconcerted  choir,  his  wife 
included,  to  the  full  view  of  the  highly  interested  congregation, 
went  back  to  his  seat  in  the  Chancel  and  sat  down.  I  went 
back  to  my  sermon,  but  our  adventures  were  not  yet  over. 
The  stone  sill  of  the  church  door  was  low,  the  grass-grown 
graves  pressed  up  close  to  it,  and  presently  out  of  the  grass 


i32  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

came  a  hen,  followed  by  her  brood  of  chicks.  The  sleepy  old 
sexton  never  saw  her  till  she  was  well  up  the  aisle.  Then  he 
made  a  rush  for  her.  The  hen  protested  loudly  and  the  chicks 
scattered.  "Leave  her  alone,  John,"  said  the  Doctor,  "she's 
doing  no  harm.  She  knows  well  there  is  generally  plenty  of 
room  in  the  church."1 

God  forbid  that  I  should  criticize  harshly  the  poor,  defeated 
clergy  of  the  old  town.  Once  many  of  them  must  have  had 
bright  hopes  of  a  life  usefully  spent  among  their  fellow-men. 
Many  of  them  must  have  toiled  hard  to  win  that  learning 
which  won  them  recognition  in  the  University,  and  so  enabled 
them  to  step  out  of  the  order  into  which  they  were  born. 

Stopford  Brook  in  his  diary,  with  sympathetic  insight,  out- 
lines the  tragedy  often  attending  such  lives: 

How  many  fine  intellects,  how  many  men  who  have  done  original  work  in 
many  paths,  have  been  buried  in  the  grave  of  the  Church  of  England.  It  is 
shocking  to  think  of  it.  The  miserable  conventions  tied  them  down.  The 
strong  escape  the  bonds  and  do  what  suits  them  well.  There  are  others  whom 
the  atmosphere  exactly  suits,  and  they  do  good  work.  But  there  are  hun- 
dreds who,  not  being  strong  enough  to  resist  the  pressure,  never  develop  as 
they  ought,  and  year  by  year  they  rot  and  rot.  And  thereby  hangs  a  tale. 
Just  imagine  if  William  Morris  and  Burne  Jones  had  gone  into  the  church  as 
they  intended,  what  the  world  would  have  lost,  and  what  they  would  have 
been.  Fancy  Morris  a  fighting  Archdeacon  like  Dennison,  and  Burne  Jones 
a  rose  fancier  like  Dean  Hole! 

There  is  a  settled  melancholy  at  the  back  of  the  greater  number  of  minis- 
ters. Most  of  them  have  never  lived,  some  of  them  have  never  even  tried  to 
live.  They  know  little  or  nothing  of  the  world.  Excellent  men,  but  pro- 
foundly ignorant  of  any  human  nature  save  what  they  find  in  themselves 
and  in  their  wives.  How  can  they  preach?  The  one  thing  to  preach 
about  they  do  not  know. 

And  Stopford  Brook  might  have  added  that  in  the  Church  of 
England  they  have  not,  as  the  Roman  priesthood  has,  the  im- 
mensely educating  and  quickening  aid  of  the  Confessional. 

St.  Giles'  had  always  been  well  attended.  It  stood  outside 
the  walls,  and  its  congregation  was  largely  formed  of  the  pro- 
fessional class,  lawyers,  doctors,  and  small  business  men.  There 
were,  too,  many  poor.  As  I  went  about  the  town  I  could  not 
fail  to  notice  that  it  held  a  great  non-church-going  population. 
The  Congregational  and  Presbyterian  bodies  had  their  chapels, 

'Again  I  am  but  stating  the  fact. 


NORWICH,  FIRST  CURE  OF  SOULS  133 

and  able  men  filled  their  pulpits,  but  all  their  pews  were  rented 
and  they  made  little  attempt  to  reach  the  bulk  of  the  labouring 
class.  These  should  have  been  shepherded  by  the  Church  of 
England,  but  they  were  not;  the  problem  was  how  to  reach 
them.  I  told  my  rector  I  wanted  to  try  to  do  a  little  on  this 
line.  Many  difficulties  presented  themselves,  and  the  chief 
of  them  was  the  most  ridiculous.  I  must  not  preach,  even  on 
the  street,  in  any  of  the  forty-odd  parishes,  without  first  ob- 
taining the  permission  of  its  rector.  The  rector  of  a  parish 
could  not  silence  a  street  ranter,  but  he  could  his  fellow  cleric. 
I  had  made  up  my  mind  that  the  best  and  most  effective  thing 
I  could  do  was  to  preach  on  the  streets.  In  Norwich  market- 
place stood  a  very  lovely  Gothic  church,  empty  enough 
on  Sundays,  quite  empty  week-days.  The  market-place  was 
within  its  parish  bounds,  but  certain  ideas  of  freedom  of  con- 
course seemed  to  go  with  a  great  market,  and  there  I  deter- 
mined to  make  a  start.  I  made  no  request  for  permission  to 
speak — for  to  do  so  would  have  brought  certain  refusal. 

I  chose  a  fine  day  in  the  autumn.  I  put  on  my  best  frock 
coat,  and  furnished  me  with  a  powerful  bell.  I  went  quite 
alone.  I  told  no  one,  not  even  my  dear  lady.  I  stood  under 
the  old  church  wall.  The  market  square  sloped  up  to  me.  I 
rang  my  bell  and  then,  as  from  all  over  the  square,  full  of 
people  at  that  hour,  a  crowd  gathered,  I  spoke  for  some  fifteen 
minutes,  not  more,  and  went  away.  The  police  did  not  inter- 
fere, as  I  had  chosen  my  stand  so  as  not  to  obstruct  traffic, 
and  there  was  no  protest  made  by  the  rector  of  the  parish. 
One  of  the  farmers  living  near  Earlham  said  to  my  startled 
lady  that  evening:  "Your  new  curate  is  a  Methody,  he  was 
preaching  in  the  market  to-day,  and  he  didn't  look  like  a  Meth- 
ody, either." 

So  began  a  work  that  grew  and  lasted  for  the  next  two  years, 
and  I  think  I  am  only  stating  the  truth  when  I  say,  affected 
for  good  the  social  as  well  as  the  religious  life  of  the  city. 
Helpers  gathered  round  me  from  that  day  onward.  We  map- 
ped the  city  into  districts,  and  about  forty  of  us  preached  in  the 
streets  all  over  the  town.  There  was  some  rough  play  at  first, 
and  some  were  hurt  by  stone  throwing,  but  this  soon  ceased. 
From  the  older  central  parishes  of  the  town  complaints  were 
made  to  the  Bishop.     He  ignored  them.     In  the  outlying  and 


134  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

more  populous  parishes  we  received  sympathetic  if  not  active 
support.  My  band  of  young  assistants  had  even  less  experi- 
ence, less  learning,  less  theology  than  had  I.  But  then  our 
religious  lives  had  been  touched  and  quickened.  We  were  all 
dead  in  earnest  and  we  were  not  seeking  anything  for  our- 
selves. Simple  conditions  to  fulfill,  but  when  they  are  ful- 
filled, something  in  the  deepest  part,  the  finally  permanent 
part  of  human  nature,  quickly  responds  to  those  who  fulfill 
them. 

To  compare  the  little  with  the  great,  English  religious  life, 
decayed  almost  to  death,  and  a  large  part  of  American  life,  too, 
had,  when  Wesley  and  Witfield  were  driven  out  of  the  church 
and  into  the  streets  and  fields,  one  hundred  years  before,  been 
mightily  moved  by  the  same  direct  appeal.  What  those  greatly 
persecuted  men  and  their  followers  did  to  save  the  religious  life 
of  the  two  nations  destined  largely  to  lead  and  mould  the 
civilization  of  the  next  century,  it  is  impossible  to  exaggerate. 
We  knew  no  other  gospel;  we  preached  no  other.  Our  Evan- 
gelical message  of  pardon  for  the  sinner  who  repented,  and 
new  strength  and  hope  for  the  reborn  man,  was  the  same  as 
theirs.  It  uplifted  and  saved  England  and  America  in  the 
Eighteenth  Century;  I  have  tried  to  show  some  few  of  the 
results  it  had  in  the  Nineteenth  Century;  and  whatever  changes 
may  come  in  the  far  future,  however  necessary  it  may  be  to 
modify  the  methods  used  in  stating  it,  so  as  to  commend  it  to 
the  consciences  of  men  and  make  it  fit  with  the  learning  of  the 
times,/  am  convinced  it  ever  will  remain  the  central  core,  the  living, 
growing  seed  core,  of  the  Gospel  of  the  Universal  Jesus. 

Some  will  ask,  "How  can  you  account  for  the  religious  con- 
dition you  describe  in  a  diocese,  ruled  by  so  wise  and  saintly 
a  bishop;  one,  too,  who  took  pains  to  select  clergy  fitted  for 
their  work?"  This  question  I  often  put  to  myself.  And  I 
asked  it  of  others  who  knew  the  east  of  England  better  than 
I  did.  The  Bishop  was  called  to  struggle  against  conditions 
of  unusual  and  continuous  neglect  by  his  predecessors.  The 
ways  of  the  Church  of  England  were  strange,  as  I  have  illus- 
trated by  my  two  stories  of  college  livings,  and  some  of  the 
evils  of  these  times  have  been  removed.  But  still  of  her  and 
of  all  the  churches  it  is  true  that  their  ordering  and  machinery, 
as  well  as  their  doctrines,  are  old  and  out  of  date.     In  them  all 


NORWICH,  FIRST  CURE  OF  SOULS  135 

the  new  order  is  not  yet  born,  and  all  alike  need  to  heed,  before 
it  is  too  late,  Tennyson's  tremendous  warning  that 

God  fulfills  himself  in  many  ways, 

Least  one  good  custom  should  corrupt  the  world. 

When  I  came  to  Norwich  its  suburban  parishes,  all  of  whose 
rectors  were  appointed  by  the  Bishop,  were  well  served,  and  in 
many  of  the  country  districts  there  was  a  change  for  the  better. 
One  good  odd  old  parson,  Mr.  Haslam,  went  all  over  the  im- 
mense diocese,  preaching  in  the  churches  where  he  was  in- 
vited, and  if  the  church  doors  were  closed  to  him,  as  often  they 
were,  in  dissenting  chapels  or  schoolhouses.  He  had  many 
friends  and  a  good  many  enemies.  He  told  me  once  of  a  good 
but  hesitating  cleric  who  asked  him  to  take  a  mission  in  his 
church  for  ten  days.  Haslam  did,  and  he  filled  the  old  church. 
When  he  was  leaving,  his  host  said,  "How  is  it  you  get  the 
people?  I  work  hard.  I  visit  regularly.  I  write  my  sermons 
carefully.  And  the  people  go  to  sleep  and  stay  asleep."  "I'll 
tell  you,"  said  Haslam.  "Your  pulpit  stands  at  the  head  of 
the  aisle,  facing  the  entrance  door.  You  take  your  sermon; 
you  go  into  the  pulpit.  You  read  it  out  carefully  and  it  is 
like  yourself,  so  straight,  so  orderly,  that  it  goes  down,  straight 
down  the  aisle  and  out  of  the  big  door.  My  poor  sermons,  well 
— they  aren't  like  sermons  at  all.  They  are  just  like  a  fire- 
cracker. It  goes  first  in  one  direction,  then  in  another.  It  fizzes 
and  cracks  in  this  pew,  and  jumps  into  that.  No  man  can  tell 
when  it  may  catch  him.  So  they  all  stay  awake."  The  clergy 
had  to  admit  that  if  Haslam  was  not  much  of  a  preacher,  still  he 
certainly  did  his  hearers  good  and  at  least  kept  them  awake. 
And  that  was  accomplishing  something  in  sleepy  Norfolk. 

It  took  time  to  make  any  impression  on  old  Norwich,  but 
at  last  the  city  moved.  A  number  of  the  clergy  agreed  that 
something  should  be  done,  and  they  invited  a  well-known 
Evangelical,  Henry  Varley,  to  speak  in  St.  Andrew's  Hall  for 
a  week.  St.  Andrew's  Hall  was  the  stately  remnant  of  what 
must  once  have  been  a  magnificent  mediaeval  church.  It  was 
used  for  town  meetings,  and  seated  two  thousand  on  the  floor. 
The  invitation  came  to  Mr.  Varley  from  my  rector  and  a 
group  of  Evangelical  clergy.  The  University  churches  and  the 
High  Churches  washed  their  hands  of  the  affair. 


136  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Varley  was  a  powerful  speaker;  he  had  been  a  butcher,  and 
looked  it;  but  he  was  a  right  good  man.  Night  after  night 
the  hall  was  packed.  When  he  was  leaving,  he  urged  the 
clergy  who  had  invited  him,  to  carry  on  the  work.  None  of 
them  felt  able  to  do  this.  So  before  them  all,  suddenly  and 
without  warning,  he  turned  to  me.  "Then,  Rainsford,  you 
must  carry  on  these  meetings  on  Sunday  nights."  I  said  it 
was  impossible  from  every  point  of  view.  "You've  got  to; 
these  people  are  hungry  and  must  be  fed."  Then  said  I, 
"So  help  me  God,  I'll  try."  The  result  was  that,  till  I  left 
Norwich,  for  almost  two  years,  autumn,  winter,  and  till  mid- 
summer, after  I  had  preached  in  St.  Giles'  I  went  down  to  the 
hall  and  repeated  my  sermon  there.  Sometimes  the  hall  was 
quite  full,  sometimes  not  more  than  half  full.  But  I  always 
had  at  least  a  thousand  people.  Twenty-five  years  after  I  was 
travelling  back  to  New  York  from  my  little  ranch  in  the 
Rocky  Mountains.  I  noticed  a  man  staring  at  me  on  the  train. 
"You  must  be  Rainsford."  "I  am,"  I  said.  "I  used  to 
listen  to  you  in  St.  Andrew's  Hall,  Norwich,  in  1875,  and  I 
never  have  forgotten  some  of  the  things  you  gave  me  at  those 
services.     I  live  in  Dakota  now." 

About  this  time  I  preached  one  Sunday  morning  in  St. 
John's,  Halkin  Street,  for  my  father,  and  could  not  but  notice 
a  very  considerable  falling  off  in  his  congregation.  There  were 
very  few  young  men  there,  and  some  years  before  these  were 
not  lacking.  St.  Giles'  was  full  of  young  people.  What  was 
the  reason?  It  seems  strange  to  me  since  then  that  I  had  not 
long  before  grasped  the  evident  fact  that  to  keep  men  in  the 
Church  of  God  you  must  set  them  at  work  in  the  Church  of 
God.  "If  a  man  will  not  sow,  neither  shall  he  reap,"  so  runs 
the  everlasting  law.  And  that  is  just  what  my  dear  father 
and  the  men  of  his  time  and  party  never  did.  I  had  kept  my 
young  men  because  I  set  them  to  work,  and  each  worker  be- 
came in  turn  a  magnet  to  draw  others.  In  this  way  there  came 
to  me  a  clearer  idea  of  how  to  make  the  church  a  power. 

I  am  afraid  I  was  not  popular  among  the  city  clergy,  but 
J.  W.  Nash,  rector  of  the  next  parish,  and  my  own  dear  rector, 
were  staunch  friends  of  mine  from  the  first  day  I  came  to  Nor- 
wich till  I  left  it.  To  two  notable  Non-Conformist  divines,  Doc- 
tor Gould,  a  Baptist,  and  Doctor  Barrett,  a  Congregationalist, 


NORWICH,  FIRST  CURE  OF  SOULS  137 

I  also  owe  a  debt.  I  followed  their  advice  in  my  reading, 
and  their  homes  were  always  open  to  me.  They  both  had  been 
resident  for  many  years  in  Norwich,  and  I  was  helped  and 
encouraged  by  them  and  their  people  more  than  by  the 
churches  in  my  own  denomination. 

About  this  time,  namely,  the  second  year  of  my  residence  in 
Norwich,  I  began  to  read  in  a  wider  field.  Doctor  Barrett  in- 
troduced me  to  the  books  of  Dale  of  Birmingham,  counted  a 
sound  Liberal  then,  and  I  discovered  somehow  F.  W.  Robert- 
son of  Brighton.  He  preached  for  only  five  or  six  brief  years. 
Misunderstood  and  denounced  by  both  High  Churchmen  and 
Evangelicals,  he  was  a  lonely  man,  a  voice  crying  in  the  wilder- 
ness. Worn  out,  he  died  when  almost  a  youth.  But  the 
tongue  of  fire  was  his,  and  as  a  preacher  no  man  in  England  in 
the  Nineteenth  Century  compared  with  him;  so  Stanley  once 
said.  His  sermons,  and  still  more  his  letters,  which  wisely  his 
biographer  Stopford  Brook  published  with  brief  comment,  and 
so  permitted  them  to  speak  for  their  author,  I  read  and  reread. 
When  I  was  tired  and  preached  out,  I  went  to  them.  When  I 
was  discouraged,  I  found  in  the  letters  new  courage.  They 
meant  more  to  me  than  any  other  books  for  many  years. 

I  sent  Robertson's  "Life"  to  my  little  sister  in  Africa  some 
years  after  this  date.  The  book  never  reached  her,  for  my 
dear  good  father  commandeered  it  and  burned  it. 

Mazzini,  too,  I  discovered  in  those  days,  and  Matthew 
Arnold's  poetry  supplemented  Tennyson's  "In  Memoriam." 
Thus  it  is  evident  I  was  wandering,  innocently  it  is  true,  yet 
wandering,  into  pastures  new  and  full  of  dangerous  noxious 
weeds. 

But  the  first  growing  pain  I  had  was  not  caused  by  these 
teachers.  It  came  to  me  in  studying  the  New  Testament  it- 
self. My  earliest  morning  hour  was  given  to  this  and  to 
nothing  else.  Infant  baptism  first;  and  next,  the  utterly 
mechanical  theory  of  it,  so  unmistakably  stamped  on  the 
Church's  office  for  the  baptism  of  infants,  unsettled  me.  As 
yet  I  had  no  glimmering  of  the  great  truth  of  evolution.  I 
never  dreamed  that  man's  religious  ideas  were  as  truly  an 
evolution  as  were  any  other  of  his  ideas — on  agriculture, 
or  geography,  or  science,  or  sociology.  Religion  was  a  divine 
revelation.     This  I  had  been  taught;  to  this  I  held  stoutly. 


138  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

I  was  to  suffer  much  before  I  learned  that  just  because  man  is 
incurably  religious,  his  religion,  his  religious  beliefs,  are  the 
most  markedly  evolutionary  things  about  him.  Meanwhile, 
failing  this  clue,  I  was  face  to  face  with  the  startling  fact  that 
infant  baptism  was  not  taught  in  the  New  Testament. 

Looking  back  on  it  all,  it  seems  a  boyish  difficulty,  but  it 
meant  hard  pain  to  me  then.  All  I  had,  and  knew,  and  believed, 
and  preached  depended  on  the  absolutely  verbal  inspiration 
of  an  inerrant  book.  And  as  I  read  that  book,  I  had  no  right 
to  use  that  infant  baptismal  service.  I  shall  not  give  much 
space  in  my  story  to  the  discussion  of  various  doctrines  that 
have  become  practically  obsolete  to  educated  people.  Such 
discussion  is  no  longer  profitable.  Religious  questions  that 
raised  an  immense  pother  in  the  '8o's  and  '90's — who  cares 
to  notice  them  now?  But  since  this,  my  first  serious  attack 
of  doubt,  changed  finally  the  whole  course  of  my  life,  I  cannot 
pass  it  hastily  by.  And  furthermore  it  enables  me  to  stress, 
here  at  the  beginning  of  my  clerical  life,  a  lesson,  nay,  a  message 
rather,  I  do  with  all  my  heart  want  to  give  to  all  who  knew 
me,  or  who  attach  any  value  to  what  I  now  write;  and  that  is: 

If  you  are  honest  with  yourself,  and  with  your  fellow-men 
who  honour  you  with  their  attention,  if  you  speak  out  and  do 
not  hedge,  you  will  find  that  you  can  help  and  feed  and  lead 
and  comfort  many  people.  Such  a  course  may  threaten  you 
with  calamity,  professional  and  personal,  but  if  you  follow  your 
Master  you  must  put  the  Truth  first;  and  in  the  end  you  will 
have  both  the  approval  of  your  conscience  and  a  trustful 
following  of  your  fellow-men. 

One  of  the  chief  reasons  why  the  clergy  to-day  have  not 
the  same  influence  they  had  even  forty  years  ago  is  that  they 
have  impressed  the  keenly  discerning  spirit  of  the  time  with  a 
grave  doubt  of  their  intellectual  and  moral  courage.  Courage 
is  the  one  thing  surely  before  all  other  things  a  leader  must 
have.  Men  to-day  will  forgive  much.  They  will  forgive  an 
unbalanced  crank  and  half-instructed  reformer;  they  will  be 
tolerant  of  a  pronounced  reactionary;  but  they  have  no  use  for 
the  man  who  claims  the  privilege,  the  superb  privilege,  of  the 
pulpit,  on  their  one  holiday  morning  in  seven,  to  discourse 
platitudes  rather  than  unburden  his  soul. 

I  now  set  myself  to  read  widely  the  literature  of  baptism. 


NORWICH,  FIRST  CURE  OF  SOULS  139 

I  studied  my  own  church's  literature,  and  got  into  correspond- 
ence with  the  best  men  in  the  country,  Mr.  Spurgeon  among 
the  rest,  who  sent  me  a  sheaf  of  books.  The  stock  arguments 
with  which  the  Evangelical  party  sought  to  compromise  be- 
tween the  plain  teaching  of  our  service  and  their  preaching, 
I  could  not  swallow.  I  went  to  my  rector  and  my  father;  then 
to  my  bishop.  All  of  them  were  kind  and  patient,  but  they 
could  not  answer  the  questions  that  were  troubling  me.  I 
could  find  no  evidence  that  infants  had  been  baptized  by 
Jesus  or  his  disciples,  and  I  never  have  been  able  to  find  any. 
If  the  pedo-baptists  had  frankly  said  that  infant  baptism  was 
a  natural  development  of  adult  baptism,  an  inevitable  change 
in  the  custom  of  the  church;  that  the  magical  blessings  that 
soon  came  to  be  attached  to  it  inevitably  induced  loving 
parents  and  zealous  missionaries  in  those  early  days  to  baptize 
little  children  in  danger  of  death,  the  reasonableness  of  the 
changed  application  of  the  Sacrament  would  have  been  evident. 
But  then  to  make  such  an  admission  no  party,  in  the  church 
or  out  of  it,  was  at  the  time  prepared.  High  sacramentarians, 
low  Evangelicals,  and  the  Baptists  none  of  them  accepted  the 
evolutionary  law,  and  all  of  them  insisted  that  their  doctrine 
was  the  only  true  doctrine  based  on  the  impregnable  rock  of 
Holy  Scripture. 


CHAPTER  XI 

Leaving  England 

We  cannot  kindle  when  we  will 

The  fire  that  in  the  soul  resides. 
The  spirit  bloweth  and  is  still. 
In  mystery  the  soul  abides. 
But  tasks  in  hours  of  insight  willed 
May  be  through  hours  of  gloom  fulfilled. 

— Matthew  Arnold. 

No  one  can  accuse  Matthew  Arnold  of  a  lack  of  emotional 
balance,  nor  was  he  hasty  in  his  assessment  of  moral  values. 
Religious  revivals  have  had  large  share  in  shaping  the  history 
of  our  race,  and  the  subject  is  of  importance  and  needs  to  be 
dealt  with  in  a  popular  way.  William  James  argues  "that  the 
whole  phenomenon  of  regeneration  and  conversion,  even  in  its 
most  startling  instantaneous  examples,  may  be  a  strictly  nat- 
ural process,  divine  in  its  fruits  (in  some  cases  more,  in  others 
less)  but  neither  more  nor  less  divine  in  its  causation  and  mech- 
anism than  any  other  process,  high  or  low,  of  man's  interior 
life."     ("Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,"  p. 230.) 

I  quote  William  James  because,  several  years  before  I 
read  his  brilliant  and  most  helpful  book,  I  had  myself  come  to 
the  conclusion  that  it  was  a  dangerous  mistake  to  ascribe  the 
various  manifestations  of  religious  emotion,  which  for  years 
I  had  somewhat  unusual  opportunities  of  studying,  as  being 
in  themselves  diviner  or  more  supernatural  experiences  than 
other  emotional  experiences,  in  regard  to  which  it  never  occurs 
to  us  to  claim  a  supernatural  presence.  In  writing  this  I  fear 
I  shall  hurt  many,  but  if  so,  I  cannot  help  it.  To  speak  of 
the  vivid  experiences  of  conversion  and  new  birth  which  many 
have  known  in  this  (as  it  seems  to  them)  cold-blooded  way, 
is  not  to  deny  their  value  by  any  means.  I  would  be  the  last 
to  do  this.     My  experience  as  a  preacher,  my  memories  of 

140 


LEAVING  ENGLAND  141 

home,  would  make  it  impossible  for  me  to  do  so.  But  on  the 
other  hand,  I  am  convinced  that  to  put  man's  religious  nature 
and  all  the  powers  and  passions  dependent  on  and  springing 
out  of  it  in  a  separate  water-tight  compartment  in  life's  great 
cargo  ship,  insisting  that  in  their  production  and  ordering,  in 
their  birth  and  development,  other  forces,  higher  forces,  forces 
supernatural,  forces  peculiarly  divine,  are  necessary — forces 
other  than  those  controlling  what  we  thoughtlessly  call  our 
ordinary  ways  of  life — that  I  do  not  believe.  I  do  believe  that 
our  capacity  to  surrender  our  wills,  not  necessarily  once  only,  to 
the  highest  we  know,  means  an  access  of  power,  a  fuller  intake 
of  life.  And  that  the  phenomena  accompanying  that  self- 
surrender,  in  different  ages  and  peoples  and  religions,  though 
they  have  been  vividly  strange,  startling,  and  unaccountable, 
are  natural — supernormal,  if  you  will,  but  natural;  and  some 
day  we  shall  understand  them  as  we  do  not  now. 

"Were  we  writing  the  story  of  the  mind  from  the  purely 
natural  history  point  of  view,"  says  James,  "with  no  religious 
interest  whatever,  we  should  still  have  to  write  down  man's 
liability  to  sudden  conversion  as  one  of  his  most  curious  pecul- 
iarities." 

Alas!  orthodoxy  at  present  denies  the  adequacy  of  such 
an  explanation,  and  thinks  it  does  God's  service  by  insisting 
that  the  phenomena  of  conversion  and  "faith  healing"  and 
sacramental  blessing  are  all  the  supernatural  operations  of  the 
Deity. 

The  startling  and  unaccountable  experiences  common  in 
Evangelical  revivals,  whether  you  examine  those  of  1 820-1 840, 
as  Professor  C.  E.  Fanning,  the  great  Methodist  missionary, 
has  recorded  them;  or  those  so  common  in  Ireland  in  my 
youth,  or  later  in  the  Welsh  revival  meetings  of  1905,  are  ex- 
traordinarily alike.  Men,  women,  and  even  little  children 
were  moved  to  what  seemed  to  be  a  supernatural  degree — were 
wrenched  and  thrown  down  as  if  by  an  outside  force.  Eyes 
were  staring,  Mouths  twisted  and  spumy,  Death  seemed  near. 
Then  something  would  give  way,  and  with  ease  and  fluency 
they  would  pour  forth  what  was  within  them  in  prayer  and 
song.  When  it  was  over,  they  often  had  no  memory  of  what 
had  passed;  it  was  as  though  some  other  self,  a  deeper,  inner 
self,  had  come  forth  at  the  bidding  of  the  hour. 


i42  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

It  is  interesting  to  note  that  these  phenomena  have  com- 
monly appeared  among  populations  where  the  distinctively 
Evangelical  aspects  of  the  Gospel  have  been  presented  to  all 
from  childhood.  Where  the  soberer  Church  of  England  train- 
ing and  discipline  was  customary  you  did  not  find  them,  or  they 
were  rare.  In  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  in  Ireland,  and  in 
our  own  Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  this  was  also  true.  But 
of  this  I  am  sure:  that,  as  with  open  mind  we  study  the  history 
of  man's  religious  changes,  we  must  be  aware  of  similarities  of 
experiences  among  them  all.  Among  the  very  earliest  and 
coarsest,  if  you  can  call  them  so,  as  truly  as  among  the  saints 
and  mystics  of  ancient  and  modern  times. 

The  medicine  man  of  the  Red  Indians,  the  wildly  eloquent 
Negro  leading  a  prayer  meeting,  the  faith  healer  swaying  an 
educated  audience  in  London  or  New  York,  the  witch  doctors 
in  Darkest  Africa,  breathless  thousands  waiting  outside  the 
Grotto  at  Lourdes,  the  largest  audience  on  earth  kneeling  at 
the  Elevation  of  the  Host  in  St.  Peter's,  or  the  brilliant  scholar, 
bitterly  repentant,  holding  in  the  white-hot  stove  his  offending 
hand  till  it  was  burned  away1 — what  do  they  all  mean  ? 

They  mean  that  there  are  things  in  man's  nature  that  will 
find  expression,  that  will  out,  and  are  always  ready  to  make 
answer  to  the  voice,  the  power,  to  which  they  are  akin.  The 
glowing  eloquence  of  Phillips  Brooks,  the  fiery  appeal  of  Billy 
Sunday,  the  adoration  of  a  relic,  or  of  the  Body  and  Blood 
of  Jesus  Christ,  offered  to  the  believing  under  the  form  of 
bread  and  wine — what  are  they  ?  Keys,  call  them  keys.  Some 
golden,  if  you  will,  some  of  meaner  metal;  but  keys,  with  which 
a  mysterious  power  may  be  and  often  is  unlocked  in  the  soul  of 
the  faithful  humble  or  the  faithful  great. 

Ignorance  looks  on  in  wonder,  sometimes  with  a  sneer.  Ah, 
no!  Mock  not,  lest  you  sin  against  your  own  Holy  Spirit; 
lest  you  kill  the  best  and  highest  within  you,  or  deny  the  most 
precious  gift  in  your  fellow-man.     Our  Quaker  poet  is  right: 

All  souls  that  struggle  and  aspire, 

All  hearts  of  prayer  by  Thee  are  lit; 
And  dim  or  clear,  Thy  tongues  of  fire 

On  dusky  tribes  and  twilight  centuries  sit. 

1MIf  thy  right  hand  offend  thee,  cut  it  off."  The  incident  happened  in  one  of  our  univer- 
sities to  a  friend  of  mine,  some  years  ago. 


LEAVING  ENGLAND  143 

Nor  bounds  nor  clime  nor  creed  Thou  knowest, 

Wide  as  our  need  Thy  favours  fall; 
The  white  wings  of  the  Holy  Ghost 

Stoop,  seen  or  unseen,  o'er  the  heads  of  all. 

Why  cannot  we  hark  back  to  the  largeness  of  the  spirit  of  St. 
Paul,  hear  him  claim  all  gifts  of  men  as  equally  divine,  for  they 
are  given  for  human  service.  "Now  there  are  diversities  of  gifts 
but  the  same  spirit.  To  one  is  given  the  word  of  wisdom,  to  an- 
other, the  word  of  knowledge,  to  another  faith,  to  another  the  gifts 
of  healing,  to  another  the  working  of  miracles,  to  another,  discern- 
ing of  spirits."  What  a  comprehensive  and  comforting  list,  what 
splendid  assortment  of  powers.  All  he  claims  the  result  of  the 
spirit  Jesus  resident  in  man.  Some  of  them  we  have  come  to 
regard  as  commonplace,  and  others  as  miraculous.  Paul,  at 
least,  knew  no  such  distinction.  I  Cor.  xn,  4-1 1.  The  place 
to  look  for  God  is  not  in  a  distant  heaven  but  in  ourselves. 

I  had  a  friend  of  many  years.  He  was  a  physician.  He 
told  me  when  he  was  practising  in  Minnesota,  in  the  early  days 
of  harvesting  machinery,  accidents  in  the  harvest  field  were 
common.  He  found  an  uneducated  Swede,  a  good  man, 
whose  touch  would  immediately  staunch  the  severest  bleeding, 
even  arterial,  and  he  constantly  took  him  in  his  buggy  when 
called  to  emergency  cases.  Surely  the  churches'  business  to- 
day should  be  to  call  all  human  powers  to  their  high  use.  Such 
will  be  the  call  of  the  church  of  the  future. 

Few  indeed  there  have  been  of  us  who  have  always  walked 
the  hard  high  pathway  of  their  best;  few  who  have  always  been 
obedient  to  what  they  knew  was  their  heavenly  vision.  But,  as 
poor  Pilgrim  was  the  better  man  for  even  a  glimpse  of  the 
Delectable  Mountains,  so  "the  man  with  the  hoe"  or  Millais' 
Kneeling  Peasants,  or  the  plainest  of  plain  people,  or  the  great- 
est of  great  people,  all  are  enabled  better  to  fulfil  life's  tasks 
for  seeing,  however  briefly,  their  life's  best  vision. 

But  does  it  last,  you  say?  Does  your  converted  man  remain 
a  convert  from  his  baser  self?  Often,  very  often,  he  does; 
but  if  he  does  not!  Men  may  lapse  from  every  level,  but 
even  in  the  Valley  of  the  Shadow  they  remember  that  once 
they  stood  on  the  shining  heights,  and  they  are  the  better  for 
the  remembrance. 

From  1876  to  the  autumn  of  1878  I  was  a  revival  preacher. 


144  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Looking  back  on  that  time,  and  reading  again  the  notes  of  my 
so  boyish  sermons,  I  can  see  that  what  power  I  had  came  from 
the  "oneness"  of  my  aim.  I  lived  for  my  work  and  my  people 
and  for  nothing  else.  I  had  but  very  few  social  engagements. 
I  quite  gave  up  the  outdoor  life  of  sport  I  had  so  loved. 
My  rod  and  gun  I  never  touched.  So  far  as  books  were  con- 
cerned, I  was  a  poorly  educated  young  cleric.  But  my  eye 
was  single,  and  truly  I  was  happy,  for  my  whole  body  was 
full  of  light. 

Then  it  was  that  in  my  first  fresh  youth  I  began  to  taste  the 
sweetness  of  a  new  and  very  real  joy.  People  came  to  hear 
me  wherever  I  preached.  I  began  to  know  the  intoxication  of 
the  crowd,  the  strange  electric  thrill  of  a  mass  of  people  waiting 
on  you! — waiting  to  be  won!  My  preparations  came  with 
difficulty,  but  in  the  delivery  of  what  I  had  prepared  I  was  well 
repaid.  If  a  preacher  can  but  forget  himself,  if  he  believes  he 
has  a  real  message,  if  he  feels  he  is  pushing  that  message  home, 
I  think  there  are  few  if  any  experiences  like  his,  few  if  any  finer 
in  life.  Usually  we  walk;  to  some  it  is  given  to  run.  To  the 
preacher  at  times  it  is  permitted  to  fly,  and  not  alone,  for  he 
carries  his  people  with  him.  Of  the  Greatest  it  is  written  that, 
at  the  believing  touch  of  a  poor  sick  woman,  "he  felt  virtue  go 
out  of  him."  I  speak  with  reverence  when  I  say  that  such 
high  feeling,  such  profoundly  happy  consciousness  of  help 
longed  for  and  whole-heartedly  granted,  is  the  spiritual  reward 
of  the  preacher  and  teacher,  as  truly  now,  with  the  least  of  us, 
as  it  was  then  with  the  greatest. 

Two  strangers  came  to  England  in  these  days,  each  with  a 
message.  One  spoke  to  the  multitudes — good,  simple-minded 
Dwight  Moody.  The  other  to  a  much  smaller  circle — Adolphe 
Monod,  a  charming,  cultivated,  saintly  French  Huguenot. 
Moody  called  men  to  salvation.  Monod  pleaded  for  a  complete 
salvation,  an  absolute,  a  perpetual  surrender  of  the  will  to  God, 
and  a  profound  belief  in  His  power  to  save  those  making  such 
a  surrender  from  all  sin.  Monod's  message  influenced  the 
best  religious  life  in  England.  Representative  clergy  and  laity 
were  invited  to  meet  Monsieur  Monod  at  Lord  Mount  Temple's 
spacious  home,  and  I  as  my  father's  son  received  an  invitation. 
We  lived  together  in  "retreat"  for  several  days,  joining  in 
prayer  and  meditation  much  of  the  time,  and  listening  to 


LEAVING  ENGLAND  145 

addresses  all  on  the  subject  of  holiness,  the  privilege  open  to  all 
Christians,  the  baptism  of  power,  a  preparation  for  all  religious 
work. 

When  I  joined  the  devoted  band  (they  came  from  all  over 
Great  Britain),  my  mind  was  in  a  disturbed  state.  My  future 
was  all  uncertain :  should  I  remain  in  the  Church  of  England  or 
resign  ?  If  I  resigned,  what  could  I  do  ?  I  was  fitted  for  nothing 
else  but  the  calling  I  had  chosen.  It  was  late  in  life  to  attempt 
another.     Thus  it  was  I  came  to  this  conference  on  Holiness. 

Our  meetings  were  singularly  free  from  excitement,  but  as 
the  quiet  days  passed,  barriers  of  reserve  were  quite  broken 
down,  and  people  spoke  as  freely  to  each  other,  in  their  confes- 
sions of  sin  and  failure,  as  they  did  in  their  prayers  to  God.  We 
were  expecting  good  things.  We  were  like  the  apostles  of  old, 
"all  of  one  accord  and  in  one  place,"  and  though  we  heard  no 
"rushing  mighty  wind,"  and  though  we  saw  no  "cloven 
tongues  of  fire,"  there,  in  English  summer-time,  under  the 
great  trees,  we  had  our  Pentecost,  too.  Men  and  women  then 
spoke  as  never  they  had  spoken  before — "as  the  spirit  gave 
them  utterance." 

I  went  back  to  Wandsworth,  where  my  people  then  lived,  a 
new  light  in  my  soul,  a  new  peace  in  my  heart,  and  within  me 
a  still,  small  but  clear  voice  crying:  "Say  not  I  am  a  child,  for 
thou  shalt  go  to  all  that  I  shall  send  thee,  and  whatsoever  I 
command  thee  thou  shalt  speak."  Truly,  I  then  had  need  of  the 
spiritual  help  I  received  at  Broadlands,  Lord  Mount  Temple's 
place,  for  no  one  at  home  could  in  the  least  understand  the 
difficulties  I  was  in,  or  approve  of  the  way  I  proposed  to  myself 
to  get  out  of  them.  I  felt  that  I  must  leave  England  at  least  for 
a  time,  but  both  my  father  and  mother  could  see  no  sense  or 
reason  in  such  a  course.  To  my  difficulty  about  Infant  Baptism 
was  now  added  that  of  the  Athanasian  Creed.  I  turned  from 
it  with  loathing.  After  fruitless  discussion  at  home,  I  took 
one  day  a  walk  in  the  south  of  London.  The  town  suited  the 
mood  I  was  in  better  than  the  country.  After  walking  a  long 
way,  I  found  myself  standing  before  a  mean  little  yellow  brick 
Baptist  Chapel,  somewhere  in  that  wilderness  of  dingy  streets 
called  the  Borough.  It  was  tight  shut,  a  dismal-looking  little 
place.  "You  are  coming  to  that!"  I  said  to  myself.  "Are 
you  willing  to  come  to  that?" 


146  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

I  thought  of  dear  Earlham,  of  the  crowd  of  expectant  faces 
in  St.  Andrew's  Hall,  of  my  poor  Norwich  people.  I  thought 
of  the  kind  words  of  a  very  great  nobleman  indeed,  who,  the 
day  before,  when  I  told  him  I  was  intending  to  seek  work  out 
of  England,  had  urged  me  to  stay,  saying  the  Church  needed 
all  her  young  men  at  home,  and  promising  me  his  influence  if  I 
decided  to  stay. 

Since  I  am  trying  to  tell  all  the  truth  about  this,  my  hour 
of  choice,  I  will  confess  to  one  thing  more  that  made  it 
hard  to  go  away.  As  I  stood  there,  before  that  mean  little 
chapel,  I  saw  again  a  woman's  face,  a  woman  into  whose  face 
I  had  looked  but  a  week  before,  and  who  had  looked  back  into 
mine,  and  as  nothing  else  did,  that  look  of  hers  held  me  to  Eng- 
land. 

I  don't  know  how  long  I  stood  before  that  poor  little  place. 
I  do  know  I  saw  my  way  clearly,  and  I  said  to  my  God,  "I  am 
willing  to  do  Thy  will,  even  if  it  means  a  little  Baptist  Chapel 
in  the  Borough."  Then  I  took  the  long  walk  home  to  Wands- 
worth with  a  great  peace  in  my  heart. 

In  biographies  it  is  usually  taken  for  granted  that  the  hero 
always  "wills"  to  do  the  right  thing  as  he  sees  it  at  all  costs. 
I  wish  I  could  truthfully  say  that  in  my  own  case  I  always 
faced  my  problems  with  as  "single  an  eye"  as  I  did  this  great 
problem.  I  can  make  no  such  claim,  but  I  am  glad  I  was 
enabled  to  do  the  right  thing  then,  though  from  a  worldly  point 
of  view  my  choice  seemed  the  choice  of  a  fool. 

I  linger  over  the  story  of  these  closing  days  of  my  English 
life  because  I  cannot  help  doing  so.  I  was  leaving  more  than 
I  knew.  I  was  leaving  my  mother  who,  do  what  I  could,  I 
felt  was  fading  out  of  my  life.  She  did  not  understand  me, 
could  not  sympathize  with  my  doubts  and  questionings,  put- 
ting it  all  down  to  my  restlessness  and  desire  for  change.  I 
was  leaving  my  second  home,  at  Norwich,  and  the  hundreds 
of  loving  friends  and  fellow-workers  who  with  me  had  done 
something  to  revive  the  religious  life  of  the  whole  city.  I  was 
leaving  the  friends  of  my  boyhood  and  my  youth.  Of  such 
friendships  Thackeray  says:  "Cultivate  those  friendships  of 
your  youth;  it  is  only  in  that  generous  time  that  they  are  formed. 
How  different  the  intimacies  of  the  after  years  are,  and  how 
much  weaker  the  grasp  of  your  hand  after  it  has  been  shaken 


LEAVING  ENGLAND  147 

about  in  commerce  with  the  world,  and  has  squeezed  and 
dropped  a  thousand  equally  careless  palms." 

But  more  even  than  that,  I  was  leaving  behind  me,  though 
I  did  not  realize  it  till  long  afterward  the  faith  of  my  boyhood, 
or  rather  the  mechanism  of  that  faith,  when  I  turned  my  back 
on  the  dear  cradle  of  its  nurture.  My  departure  from  England 
was  a  more  resolute  protest  than  I  was  aware  of,  against  the 
strangling  party  orthodoxy  into  which  I  was  born.  I  think  it 
is  Matthew  Arnold  who  wrote — I  cannot  verify  the  quotation, 
for  my  memory  is  execrable,  but  the  splendour  of  the  statement 
rings  clearly  in  my  mind:  "When  shall  we  learn  that  what 
attaches  people  to  us  is  the  spirit  we  are  of,  not  the  machinery 
we  employ?" 

Before  I  was  born,  my  father  and  mother  had  willed  and 
prayed  that  on  their  first-born  should  be  poured  out  the  spirit 
of  Him  who  came  to  "preach"  the  gospel.  This  was  their  aim 
and  it  was  to  be  (so  they  prayed)  their  son's  aim.  Their  faith 
was  my  faith,  their  purpose  my  purpose. 

Life  was  to  us  a  very  simple  affair.  Any  one  could  under- 
stand it.  God  was  its  author,  its  Lord,  its  Saviour,  its  daily 
provider  and  guide.  God  blessed  it  in  joy  here  and  in  glory 
eternal  hereafter.  He  was  also  its  inexorable  punisher.  He 
damned  men  to  everlasting  hell  as  surely  as  He  saved  them 
in  a  final  heaven.  Saving  souls  was  not  a  business  of  life,  but 
the  business  of  life;  for  a  man  was  saved  here  and  now,  and  if 
not,  he  was  already  damned,  the  wrath  of  God  was  resting  on 
him.  It  seems  dreadful  to  write  of  such  things  now;  it  did  not 
so  seem  then  to  us,  brought  up  to  believe  them  as  matters  of 
course.  We  can  see  to-day  the  glaring  faultiness  of  such  a 
creed,  its  shallow  and  unworthy  idea  of  God,  its  monstrous 
misconception  of  His  justice,  the  pitiful  partiality  of  His  love, 
His  gross  favouritism,  and  the  tendency  to  an  all  too  obvious 
self-complacency  begotten  of  such  a  creed  in  us  who  held  our- 
selves to  be  His  special  favourites. 

To  pile  up  unanswerable  indictments  against  that  old 
Evangelical  creed  is  easy  enough,  but  the  one  mighty  thing 
about  it  was  that  the  men  who  held  it  (and  from  St.  Paul's 
time  down  it  has  been  the  creed  of  many  of  the  greatest  of  the 
great)  laid  hold  on  God,  and  so  were  strong. 

Many  like  myself,  now  growing  old,  will  remember   how 


148  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

clear  and  strong  were  those  early  experiences  of  ours,  and 
will  agree  with  me  that  with  soul  hunger  we  remember  them, 
and  would  fain,  ah,  yes,  would  fain  know  again  to-day  if  only 
we  could  their  joy  and  power.  Life  was  simple  and  so  sure. 
The  world  was  quickly  passing  away.  If  in  it  things  were  evil, 
small  matter  it  made  for  us,  whose  home  "was  not  made  with 
hands,  and  was  eternal  in  the  heavens."  There  all  we  loved 
would  meet  us,  all  parting  would  be  over,  and  the  joy  we  al- 
ready felt,  as  we  worked  and  sang  together,  would  broaden  and 
deepen  into  an  eternity  of  living  bliss. 

It  was  a  strong,  simple  gospel,  and  men  lived  strong  lives 
and  did  strong  deeds  in  the  power  of  it,  for  God  was  the  great 
Companion.  There  are  some  good  and  able,  who  think  that 
in  its  changed  conception  of  God,  a  conception  forced  on  us  by 
our  widening  knowledge  of  ourselves  and  of  the  universe  of 
which  we  are  a  part,  modern  Christianity  has  lost  nothing  and 
has  gained  much.  I  cannot  feel  this.  I  believe  there  is  more 
real  religion  in  the  world  than  when  I  was  a  boy,  that  it  is  of  a 
higher  type,  of  a  more  Christ-like  type.  But  I  think  it  has 
not  been  so  clarified,  so  popularized,  that  the  wayfaring  man 
can  take  hold  of  it.  Its  changed  emphasis  from  an  outside 
protecting  and  saving  God  to  an  indwelling,  an  inspiring  God, 
who  slowly,  by  half-understood  and  hidden  ways,  is  lifting  life 
heavenward,  must  take  a  long  time  to  popularize.  The  elect 
sainthood  of  all  ages  knew  it  and  lived  by  it,  but  the  masses 
of  troubled,  weary  mortals  have  never  found  in  it  the  equivalent 
for  the  simple  certitudes  of  this  cruder  faith. 

It  hurts  dreadfully  to  change  your  idea  of  God,  but  if  you  do 
not,  he  will  surely  fade  out  of  your  life  altogether.  Lord 
Bacon  said,  long  ago:  "It  were  better  to  have  no  opinion  at 
all  of  God,  than  such  an  opinion  as  is  unworthy  of  Him.  For 
the  one  may  be  unbelief,  but  the  other  is  contumely."  That 
is  unanswerable. 

I  can  never  be  thankful  enough  for  the  gentleness  and  wis- 
dom with  which  I  was  treated  in  those  trying  days.  Once 
more  I  went  to  my  bishop.  "I  ordained  you,"  he  said,  "I 
trust  you.  You  must  not  think  of  giving  up  your  orders  now. 
Go  out  into  the  world  and  find  yourself.  You  are  trying  to  do 
right.  God  will  make  your  path  plain.  Come  back  to  me  in 
two  years,  and  if  you  cannot  stay  in  the  Church,  I  will  take 


LEAVING  ENGLAND  149 

your  orders  from  you.  Till  then  I  lay  my  commands  on  you. 
Do  not  resign."  I  knelt  at  his  knee,  and  he  placed  his  hands 
upon  me  and  blessed  me. 

In  Earlham  I  had  found  a  home.  Mr.  Ripley  was  more  than 
my  rector,  and  my  dear  lady  was  a  second  mother  to  me. 
She  seemed  to  understand  what  I  was  suffering  as  no  one  else  in 
my  little  world  did.  I  often  find  myself  longing  now  to  tell  her 
that  after  all  these  changing  years  my  soul  blesses  her  for  her 
faith  in  me  and  love  to  me,  and  that  I  thank  my  God  that  I 
ever  knew  her.  She  is  real  to  me  now  as  are  but  one  or  two 
others  I  have  known.  She  made  life  better,  brighter,  purer, 
wherever  she  passed.  "She  went  on  her  way  doing  good, 
but  men  remembered  her  long  afterward." 

I  must  go  away.  Norwich  was  a  small  city.  To  stay  as 
curate  at  St.  Giles'  and  not  to  use  the  Baptismal  office  nor  to 
repeat  the  Athanasian  Creed  would  not  do.  Gossip  would  be 
busy,  and  I  could  not  fail  to  weaken  the  very  work  I  had 
been  building  up.  Of  course  I  had  not  hinted  at  leaving  the 
church  to  any  but  my  bishop  and  the  Ripleys.  How  was  I  to  go 
away? 

Strangely,  quite  unexpectedly,  this  difficulty  solved  itself. 
One  mid-May  morning  in  1876  the  mail  brought  me  two  let- 
ters, one  inviting  me  to  join  Henry  Varley  for  a  year  in  an 
Evangelistic  tour  in  Australia,  the  other  asking  me  to  take 
charge  of  a  large  church  in  New  York  for  four  months.  I  had 
not  the  ghost  of  an  idea  where  the  call  from  New  York  came 
from,  and  it  was  not  till  I  landed  in  the  city  that  I  found  I 
owed  it  to  my  faithful  friend,  Miss  Ellen  Logan,  at  whose  little 
chapel  in  Bethnal  Green,  ten  years  before,  I  had  made  my  first 
stammering  start  as  a  speaker. 

Miss  Logan's  movements  were  unknown  to  me.  Travelling 
in  Canada  and  the  United  States,  to  look  after  the  emigrants 
she  had  assisted  in  sending  over  there,  she  had  chanced  to 

meet  Doctor .    He  was  at  the  time  worn  out,  and  had  been 

ordered  to  take  a  needed  rest.  His  need  of  someone  to  take 
his  church  off  his  hands  temporarily  he  mentioned  to  Miss 
Logan.  "Why,"  said  she,  "I  know  just  the  man  for  you," 
and  named  me.  (She  had  no  knowledge  of  my  unsettlement  of 
mind,  or  of  my  wish  temporarily  to  leave  England.)  "He  was 
a  year  in  this  country  and  he  likes  it."     New  York  was  nearer 


150  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

home  than  Australia,  and  so  for  no  other  reason,  I  wrote  saying 
I  would  come. 

So  I  bade  good-bye  to  my  native  land,  with  a  misgiving  in 
my  heart  that  I  was  doing  so  for  ever.  I  turned  my  back  on  the 
dearest,  kindest  friends  a  young  man  ever  had,  and  they 
crowded  round  me,  begging  me  soon  to  return.  I  knew  I  was 
doing  right,  but  for  all  that,  leaving  England  meant  sore  pain 
and  a  wide  void  to  me.  It  is  no  light  matter  to  part  with  the 
friends  of  your  youth;  and  I  had  a  presentiment  that  this  was 
what  I  was  doing. 


CHAPTER  XII 

An  Alien  Missioner 

I  landed  in  New  York,  June  10,1876,  in  the  fiercest  kind  of 

heat,  103  in  the  shade.   A  layman  from Church  was  waiting 

for  me  at  the  pier,  and  he  took  me  to  a  New  Jersey  suburb 

where,  in  his  country  house,  I  found  Doctor ,  with  his  wife 

and  one  of  their  children. 

Doctor welcomed  me  very  kindly,  told  me  he  was  going 

to  rest  for  the  summer,  as  he  was  completely  fagged  out,  and 
that  he  wanted  me  to  take  charge  of  the  church.  And  then  he 
added:  "I  have  opened  a  tent  on  Thirty-fourth  Street  and 
Broadway;  I  want  you  to  preach  in  it  every  night  but  Satur- 
day." I  gasped.  "My  dear  sir,  I  came  over  understanding 
I  was  to  preach  twice  on  Sunday,  that  will  give  me  all  I  can 
do.  I  don't  know  enough  to  preach  every  night  in  a  great  city. 
I  am  only  twenty-six.  I  am  nothing  of  a  preacher;  preparing 
two  sermons  a  week  will  be  the  utmost  I  can  do,  and  that  was 
our  bargain." 

"Oh,  there  are  men  who  will  help  you  in  the  tent,"  he  re- 
plied; and,  laughing,  "anyway,  you've  got  to  do  it." 

Never  was  an  unfortunate  fellow  less  fitted  than  I  was  to 
undertake  a  task  like  this  now  forced  on  me. 

Next  Sunday  came  and  I  preached,  Doctor listening  to 

me,  the  weather  torrid,  the  church  not  one  third  full,  everyone 
out  of  town  who  could  get  out  of  town.  Everything  was  new 
and  strange.  I  was  unhappy  from  the  start,  never  got  a  hold 
either  of  my  subject  or  my  audience.  I  knew  when  I  got 
through  that  I  had  preached  as  poor  a  sermon  as  I  had  ever 

preached  in  my  life.     Doctor was  disappointed,  he  as  good 

as  told  me  so,  and  I  did  not  blame  him.  "I  have  got  to  get 
away,"  he  said.  "You  must  do  the  best  you  can."  And  so  I 
entered  upon  my  work  in  New  York. 

And  now  there  began  for  me  the  hardest  time  I  had  ever 

151 


1 52  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

had  in  my  life.  I  had  failed  in  pulpit  before,  but  then  I  was 
among  my  own  people  who  knew  me  and  cared  for  me  and 
encouraged  me.  Here  I  was  alone;  I  was  lonely  in  Spirit  and  I 
lived  alone.  Miss  Logan  had  returned  to  England,  and  not  a 
living  soul  did  I  know  in  the  great,  sweltering  city.     I  had 

only  $50  when  I  landed  and  Doctor gave  me  $100  a  month, 

nothing  in  advance.  So  I  had  to  economize.  I  took  a  hall 
bedroom  in  the  old  Rossmore  Hotel,  42nd  Street  and  Broadway, 
and  had  the  use  of  a  study  high  up  in  the  tower  of  the  church, 
where  the  heat  and  mosquitoes  were  dreadful.  From  the  mid- 
dle of  June  to  the  middle  of  September  I  preached  every  evening 
but  Saturday  in  the  tent  and  on  Sunday  morning  in  the  church. 
In  the  latter  I  also  administered  the  Holy  Communion  once  a 
week.  I  got  up  early,  and  every  day  shutting  myself  in  my 
tower,  worked  out  something  as  best  I  could  for  the  coming 
night. 

It  was  hard,  lonely  work  at  first,  but  one  thing  sustained  me: 
I  felt  I  was  being  tested.  I  had  asked  God,  as  I  stood  before 
the  little  chapel  in  the  Borough,  to  use  me  as  He  willed.  I 
would  make  no  conditions  with  Him  now  he  was  taking  me  at 
my  word.  Here  was  the  answer  to  my  prayer.  How  came  I 
here?  Was  I  seeking  an  easy  task,  an  honourable  place?  I 
looked  into  my  soul  and  answered — No !  The  memory  of  those 
quiet  days  at  Broadlands  came  to  me  with  power,  when  I  with 
others  drawn  from  all  the  branches  of  the  Christian  Church, 
meeting  with  Adolph  Monod,  had  listened  to  our  Lord's  love 
call,  and  had  reconsecrated  ourselves  to  the  doing  of  the 
Divine  will.  I  was  not  in  New  York  to  please  myself,  but 
simply  and  solely  to  do  His  will,  and  whether  I  failed  or  suc- 
ceeded, that  Will  I  would  do. 

So  I  fought  it  out  alone  on  my  knees,  in  my  hot  tower  study, 
and  though  I  was  inexperienced  and  lonely,  I  grew  strong. 

I  will  speak  here  of  a  habit  I  formed  in  those  first  days  of  my 
New  York  work.  When  I  felt  lonely,  when  I  could  not  get 
on  with  my  sermon,  I  would  walk  in  the  streets  for  a  little, 
looking  hard  into  the  faces  of  the  passers-by  as  I  tried  to  read 
their  story,  tried  to  see  the  real  man  beneath  the  face's  mask; 
and  so,  after  a  little  time,  I  went  back  to  my  study  with  a  new 
sense  of  the  worth-whileness  of  life,  a  new  sense  of  men's  need 
for  help,  and  a  new  determination  to  do  what  in  me  lay  to 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  153 

give  help.  I  could  work  better  and  preach  better  for  those 
walks.     They  often  gave  me  texts. 

I  may  say  here  that  I  never  gave  up  this  habit,  and  sometimes 
I  went  so  far,  when  I  met  response  in  some  unknown  face,  as  to 
stop  and  speak  to  my  unknown.  It  was  natural  that  such  an 
unconventional  thing  occasionally  got  me  into  trouble.  Once 
a  charming  woman  whom,  I  need  scarcely  say,  I  did  not  speak 
to,  told  her  husband  I  had  tried  to  accost  her,  and  I  had  some 
difficulty  in  convincing  him  that  such  was  not  my  intention. 
Some  of  the  best  workers  I  have  had  were  gained  in  this  way, 
"friends"  I  had  recognized  "as  I  had  passed  by." 

In  1876,  there  was  an  open  space  on  the  corner  of  34th 
Street  and  Broadway,  and  there  the  tent,  which  was  well 
pitched  and  seated  1,800,  stood.  At  the  beginning  of  my 
work  we  had  a  good  sized  crowd  on  Sunday  evenings,  for  the 
city  was  filling  with  visitors  on  their  way  to  the  Centennial  at 
Philadelphia,  and  most  of  the  churches  were  closed.  But  on 
week  days,  at  first,  the  attendances  were  very  small.      I  had 

as  assistant  workers  quite  a  number  of  men  from  Doctor 's 

church,  good  fellows  enough,  but  as  I  came  to  test  them,  quite 
unfitted  for  what  they  were  chiefly  bent  on  doing,  viz.,  speaking 
from  the  tent  platform.  When  I  had  finished  my  poor  little 
discourse,  one  or  more  of  these  would  get  on  his  feet,  mount 
the  platform  beside  me,  and  deliver  a  harangue  that  quite  undid 
what  I  had  tried  to  say.  One  of  them,  a  butcher,  a  very  de- 
termined assistant,  was  specially  difficult  to  handle.  I  hesi- 
tated to  break  with  these  good  fellows,  because  I  knew  well 
how  ignorant  I  was  of  New  York  conditions,  and  I  felt  that  I 
had  not  yet  got  any  hold  on  my  small  audiences.  Most  of 
those  who  came  at  first  to  the  tent  services  were  members  of  or 
attendants  on  Doctor 's  church,  and  if  I  turned  their  ex- 
pectations down  it  seemed  unlikely  that  I  should  have  any 
audience  at  all.  So  I  stood  the  thing  as  long  as  I  could,  and 
then  telegraphed  to  the  Doctor,  who  had  left  the  city,  that  I 
could  not  work  with  some  of  his  lay  staff  at  the  tent.  He 
wrote  back  that  I  was  working  with  a  band  of  men  he  had  had 
round  him  for  years,  and  I  must  continue  to  work  with  them. 

I  replied  at  once  by  sending  in  my  resignation.  He  could 
not  come  back,  nor  could  he  get  any  one  else  to  take  hold  of  so 
hard  a  job  as  church  and  tent  combined  offered  for  $100  a 


154  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

month;  so  I  obtained  the  undivided  authority  necessary.  But 
he  gave  it  grudgingly,  and  I  did  not  blame  him.  My  departing 
laymen  growled  and  grumbled  to  the  absent  Doctor  and  their 
friends:  but  I  made  a  second  start,  altering  choir  leaders  and  the 
machinery  generally.  Decision  was  justified,  and  the  congre- 
gations began  to  grow. 

And  now  to  me,  in  the  great  city  where  I  was  an  utter 
stranger,  came  again  the  experience  I  had  first  tasted  when, 
with  my  bell  in  hand,  I  stood  in  Norwich  market-place.  I 
began  to  feel  my  audiences;  we  had  something  in  common,  I 
and  they.  New  faces  greeted  me  night  after  night.  As  soon 
as  the  blessing  was  given,  almost  all  passed  out  into  the  crowd 
from  which  they  had  come.  They  were  unknown  to  me,  but 
we  were  friends.  And  so,  in  a  strange  land,  I  began  to  taste 
the  joy  and  strength  of  my  profession. 

The  heat  that  summer  I  shall  never  forget.  During  July  and 
August  the  thermometer  averaged  84,  night  and  day.  The 
mosquitoes,  too,  were  dreadful,  and,  for  the  first  time  in  my  life, 
I  lost  sleep.  But  I  was  living  on  manna,  sure  enough.  I  was 
tasting  success.  I  could  see,  without  self-flattery,  that  I  was 
putting  my  heavy  task  through,  and  it  was  sweet  beyond  words. 
I  had  after  all  a  message  for  these  people  in  New  York,  as  I 
had  had  for  my  poor  shoemakers  in  Norwich. 

I  finished  my  work  by  the  middle  of  September,  and  I  was 
about  finished  myself.  When  the  services  were  over,  whether 
they  were  held  in  church  or  tent,  I  always  made  my  way  to  the 
door  and  spoke  there  to  any  who  wished  to  speak  to  me.  This 
good  custom  I  never  anywhere  or  at  any  time  gave  up.  In 
the  tent,  I  invited  any  who  wished  to  remain  and  talk  to  me. 
Many  did  so,  most  of  them  strangers  in  the  city,  some  others 
residents  of  New  York.  Of  these  last,  a  considerable  number 
expressed  a  wish  to  become  confirmed  members  of  the  church 

(of  course,    Doctor  's).     Their   names  and  addresses  I 

tabulated  and  kept.  By  September  I  had  two  hundred  of 
these. 

On    September    14th,  my  engagement   with    Doctor  

expired,  and  I  waited  on  him  with  the  list.  I  might  say 
here,  that  at  this  time  I  received  an  invitation  from  the  Rev. 
Hay  Aitken,  a  very  well-known  missioner  in  the  Church  of 
England,  to  return  and  associate  myself  with  him  in  mission 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  155 

work,  but  I  did  not  feel  ready  to  go  back  to  England  just  then. 
Aitken's  offer  suggested  to  me  what  seemed  a  wise  and  natural 
course:  why  not,  on  this  side,  and  in  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church,  attempt  to  do  what  he  invited  me  to  do  in  England? 
Was  there  not  a  need  here  for  the  missioner  and  his  message? 
I  thought  there  was.  The  attempt  to  fill  such  a  role  was  rather 
ambitious.  I  was  quite  unknown  to  the  clergy,  and  of  the 
country  I  knew  little.  All  the  same,  I  made  up  my  mind  to 
try  for  missionary  work  in  the  United  States. 

Such  was  my  plan  when  I  went  to  Doctor 's  study  with 

my  list.  Briefly  I  told  him  what  I  wanted  to  do  and  asked  for 
letters  commendatory  to  some  of  his  clerical  friends.  He 
curtly  refused  my  request.  I  pressed  for  a  reason.  I  said: 
"I  have  worked  hard  here;  that  I  have  not  quite  failed,  these 
lists  prove.  These  people  want  to  join  your  church.  Why 
won't  you  give  me  letters?" 

"Well,  if  I  give  you  letters  to  different  churches,  you  will 
preach  in  them  and  possibly  unsettle  the  rector.  The  people 
may  want  you  and  not  him,  after  a  fortnight's  mission  work." 

"But  I  am  not  seeking  a  parish  in  the  Episcopal  Church. 
I  am  not  seeking  your  place  or  any  one's.  I  have  not  un- 
settled you  or  your  people.  Here  are  two  hundred  possible 
new  members  for  your  church!  All  I  want  is  a  chance  to  say 
what  is  given  me  to  say  and  earn  my  bread  on  this  side.  I 
do  not  want  to  return  to  the  Church  of  England,  where  I  am 
welcome,  till  I  see  my  way  clearer  than  I  can  now." 

It  was  no  use.  He  refused  to  give  me  a  line,  and  I  went 
away  feeling  depressed  and,  I  think,  righteously  angry. 

I  had  very  little  money.  I  owed  a  dentist's  bill  which  I 
could  not  pay.  I  had  never  taken  money  from  my  father  since 
leaving  Cambridge,  and  I  did  not  want  to  write  for  money  now. 

There  lived  then  in  Astor  Place  Mr.  Whittaker.  Many  years 
ago  he  died;  the  present  generation  has  forgotten  him,  but  a 
kinder,  more  brotherly  Christian  man  I  never  knew.  His 
book-shop  was  a  general  gathering  place  for  the  clergy,  not 
only  for  the  successful  fellows,  rectors  of  established  parishes, 
but  for  the  out-at-elbows  clericals,  men  with  no  salary  and  a 
grievance. 

Clericals  wise  and  clericals  crankish  all  dropped  into  Whit- 
taker's  shop — I  should  have  written  "store" — and  were  made 


156  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

welcome.  He  came  to  the  tent  sometimes.  He  took  me  round 
and  introduced  me  to  dear,  saintly,  evangelical  Doctor  Dyer. 
In  short,  he  did  all  that  a  wise,  loving,  elder  brother  could  do 
for  an  alien  missionary. 

Sick  at  heart  after  my  interview,  I  went  down  to  see  Mr. 
Whittaker  and  told  him  of  my  plight.  "  Go  and  see  the  Bishop. 
He  is  a  little  stiff  and  cold  at  first,  but  he  is  a  good  and  kindly 
man  at  heart,  and  there  has  been  friction  between  him  and 

Doctor ."     I  took  his  advice,  went  back  to  my  lodging, 

armed  myself  with  the  letter  given  me  on  my  leaving  St.  Giles', 
Norwich,  by  three  of  the  prominent  clergy  of  the  city,  and 
countersigned  by  my  dear  Bishop: 

We,  the  undersigned,  ministers  of  the  Church  of  England,  beneficed  in 
the  Diocese  of  Norwich,  certify  that  the  Rev.  William  S.  Rainsford  was 
personally  known  to  us  for  the  space  of  about  four  and  a  half  years,  during 
which  he  held  the  curacy  of  St.  Giles',  Norwich,  and  that  we  had  abundant 
opportunities  of  observing  his  conduct.  We  bear  willing  testimony  to  the 
holiness  and  consistency  of  his  life  and  conversation,  to  the  agreement  of  the 
doctrines  he  preached  with  the  Holy  Scripture,  and  the  Articles  of  our 
Church,  to  his  fervent  zeal  for  the  glory  of  God,  and  to  his  devoted  and  un- 
tiring labours  in  promoting  the  salvation  of  souls. 

(Signed)  Wm.  N.  Ripley,  M.  A.  Cam.  Vicar  of  St.  Giles'. 

Thos  A.  Nash,  M.  A.  Ox.  Vicar  of  St.  Philip's. 

John  Patterson,  M.  A.  Cam.  Rural  Dean. 

The  subscribers  are  beneficed  in  my 
Diocese  and  are  worthy  of  credit. 
John  N.  Norwich. 

The  Bishop  lived  in  Lafayette  Place.  Miss  Potter  opened 
the  door  to  my  knocking.  "The  Bishop  was  busy  and  could  not 
be  disturbed."  I  pleaded  my  case,  said  I  was  an  English  clergy- 
man in  need  of  his  advice.  The  lady  stood  for  a  time  stoutly 
in  my  way,  but  yielded  at  last,  when  I  said  I  really  did  not 
want  money,  but  was  a  stranger  in  the  city,  with  letters  com- 
mendatory from  my  Diocesan  in  England,  but  I  did  need 
what  the  Bishop  of  New  York  alone  could  give  me:  counsel. 

I  had  not  seen  the  Bishop  before.  He  was  an  old  man  then 
— tall  and  thin,  with  an  extraordinarily  long  neck.  I  remember 
it  struck  me  that  the  neck  had  nothing  to  do  with  his  head, 
which  turned  and  bent  quite  independently  of  its  support. 
He  sat  behind  his  writing  table;  I  stood  in  front  of  it.     I  looked 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  157 

into  a  face  that  told  me  nothing.     Briefly  as  possible,  I  told  my 

story.    "I  had  been  in  charge  of Church  since  June,  and  had 

been  preaching  nightly  in  a  tent  on  34th  Street  and  Broadway. 
I  had  had  during  the  last  six  weeks  of  that  time  large  audiences 

at  both  places.     I  had  asked  Doctor for  a  letter  which  I 

could  use  as  an  introduction  to  other  clergy,  and  he  had  refused 
to  give  me  any  letter  whatever.  I  was  a  clergyman  in  good 
standing  in  England,  but  wanted  to  get,  if  I  could,  mission  work 
in  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  for  a  time,  till  I  saw  my  way 
more  clearly  than  at  present  to  use  the  Baptismal  Office  and 
the  Athanasian  Creed." 

As  I  told  my  story  and  looked  at  the  immovable  face  before 
me  my  heart  sank,  for  I  felt  how  little  there  was  in  my  plea  to 
appeal  to  a  stranger  bishop;  and  yet  on  its  success  my  future 
course  must  depend,  for  I  was  down  and  out  unless  I  won  him 
over.  Then  I  handed  him  the  letter.  He  took  it  and  read  it 
slowly,  and  still  as  he  read  his  face  gave  me  no  hope.  Then — 
slowly — he  always  spoke  slowly — came  my  answer  in  his  old- 
fashioned,  formal  way.  "Mr.  Rainsford,  I  have  had  the 
pleasur,  sir,  of  attending  your  services  at  the  tent  you  speak  of 
from  time  to  time,  and  not  only,  sir,  have  I  found  in  them  noth- 
ing to  criticize,  but  I  have  been  edified  by  your  discourses.     I 

like  your  work,  sir,  and  if  Doctor will  not  give  you  a  letter, 

it  will  give  me  pleasure  to  do  so.  And  I  think  I  may  say  that  any 
use  you  may  see  fit  to  make  of  that  letter  will  be  of  more  as- 
sistance to  you  than  any  communication  you  could  receive 
from  Doctor ." 

The  revulsion  was  so  great,  the  surprise  caused  by  these 
words,  slowly  pronounced,  was  so  immense,  that  I  almost  broke 
down. 

"Can  I  publish  your  letter,  Sir?" 

"  Certainly;  do  so  in  any  or  all  of  the  Church  papers."  Then 
he  rose  and  took  my  hand,  said  there  was  need  for  such  mission 
work  as  I  aimed  to  do  in  the  Church,  and  asked  me  to  stay  to 
luncheon.  But  I  was  not  then  equal  to  that,  and  I  thanked  him 
and  went  away.  "Come  again,"  he  said,  kindly,  as  he  took 
me  to  the  door. 

The  letter  came  next  day.  I  lost  it  somehow,  as  I  did  many 
other  valuable  letters,  in  my  later  wanderings,  but  right  well 
it  did  its  work  for  me. 


158  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

That  evening  I  spent  with  two  dear  friends,  of  whom  I  must 
now  speak.  They  were  the  first  to  open  to  me  their  home,  at 
350  Madison  Avenue.  "I  was  a  stranger  and  they  took  me 
in."  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Edward  Owen  laid  me  under  an  obligation 
which  I  can  never  repay. 

One  awfully  hot  night  in  the  tent  they  waited  for  me  and 
asked  me  to  return  with  them  and  have  a  cool  drink.  After  that, 
when  the  day's  work  was  over,  I  often  went  round  to  "350." 
The  Owens  and  I  had  much  in  common.  They  were  enthusiastic 
black-bass  fishermen.  I  had  never  fished  for  bass,  and  this 
evening  they  proposed  that  we  three  should  take  a  holiday 
and  try  for  the  bass  on  Lake  Ontario.  Of  course  I  told  them 
of  my  extraordinary  good  fortune  with  the  Bishop  of  New  York, 
and  we  agreed  that  my  way  would  henceforth  be  easier,  and  I 
might  take  a  short  holiday  on  the  strength  of  improving  pros- 
pects.   And  I  surely  needed  it. 

We  had  rough  quarters  on  a  little  promontory  on  the  great 
lake,  but  it  was  a  blissful  time.  The  clear  clean  air,  the  cool 
green  water!  We  had  a  tent  for  Mrs.  Owen,  a  lean-to  for 
Owen  and  me.  Only  one  farm  was  there  in  the  neighbourhood, 
and  there  we  bought  milk  and  eggs,  new  potatoes  and  summer 
apples,  and  I  must  not  forget,  "broilers."  But  when  we  called 
on  our  farmer  to  produce  what  we  had  paid  for,  we  found  that 
these  last  had  still  the  run  of  the  country,  and  that  though  he 
had  sold  them,  it  remained  for  us  to  catch  them.  We  had  no 
gun,  and  I  never  chased  anything  in  my  life  harder  than  I  did 
those  "broilers."  Their  breasts  were  not  unduly  developed, 
but  they  certainly  had  sterling  substance  in  their  legs. 

The  spirit  of  the  chase  is  infectious.  The  farmer  at  first 
looked  on  somewhat  critically  at  our  effort,  but  presently  he 
went  to  a  rail  fence  and,  taking  down  a  top  rail,  joined  in. 
He  swung  his  cumbersome  weapon  vigorously  enough,  but 
his  aim  left  something  to  be  desired,  for  aiming  at  a  flying 
chicken,  he  nearly  broke  the  leg  of  his  milch  cow,  who  stood  in 
the  lot  amazed  at  our  goings-on.  Then,  damning  visitors  and 
broilers,  himself,  and  his  cow,  impartially,  he  retired  from  the 
field. 

I  needed  that  little  holiday  badly,  and,  oh,  how  I  enjoyed  it! 
I  had  worked  hard,  I  had  done  my  very  best,  I  had  not  sought 
easy  things  for  myself,  I  had  given  the  best  I  had — a  poor  best. 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  159 

but  I  had  no  better — to  the  best  I  knew.  Then,  unexpectedly, 
where  a  door  seemed  to  open  before  me,  it  had  been  slammed 
in  my  face;  and  then  again,  how  unexpectedly!  it  had  opened, 
and  stood  wide  open,  and  the  work  I  felt  myself  fitted  for  was 
offered  me. 

Before  going  fishing  with  the  Owens,  I  had  sent  copies  of 
the  kind  Bishop's  letter  to  the  church  papers,  and  when  I  re- 
turned to  New  York  two  responses  to  it  were  waiting  for  me. 

I  answered  such  offers  of  work  always  in  the  order  in  which 
they  were  written.  I  never  made  any  demand  for  money, 
asked  only  for  my  travelling  expenses,  and  left  the  matter  of 
remuneration  to  the  people  I  served.  These  rules  I  invariably 
kept.  If  an  invitation  came  from  an  out-of-the-way  church  on 
Monday  and  another  from  a  wealthy  church  on  Tuesday,  I 
took  the  Monday  church  first. 

Much  depended  on  my  first  mission.  It  was  in  St.  Peter's, 
Baltimore.  Doctor  Grammer,  the  rector,  wrote:  "Mr.  Rains- 
ford,  will  you  come  and  hold  a  mission?  We  have  heard  of 
your  work  in  the  tent.  Our  people  are  a  church-going  people, 
but  we  all  need  to  be  stirred  up.  You  are  just  the  man  we 
want."  I  wrote,  saying  I  would  be  glad  to  come,  and  asking  that 
a  house-to-house  canvass  of  the  parish  should  be  undertaken 
at  once.  When  I  did  this,  I  asked  for  more  than  even  a  well- 
organized  parish  could  accomplish;  for  the  time  was  too  short, 
and  the  majority  of  St.  Peter's  congregation  had  not  yet  re- 
turned to  heat-smitten  Baltimore.  By  return  of  mail  I  had  a 
hearty  renewal  of  my  invitation,  and  an  assurance  that  they 
all  would  be  expecting  me. 

I  went  down  to  Baltimore  on  the  Wednesday  before  the 
Sunday  when  I  was  to  begin,  telegraphing  the  hour  of  my 
arrival.  There  was  no  one  at  the  depot  to  meet  me.  I  left  my 
portmanteau  and  made  my  way  to  the  rectory — closed! 
Going  to  the  church,  I  found  it  closed.  There  was  no  address 
of  any  clergyman  on  either  rectory  or  church.  If  I  could  not 
find  a  cleric,  there  was  no  difficulty  in  finding  the  undertaker, 
and  judging  by  the  prominence  given  to  him,  his  office  would 
seem  to  be  of  more  importance  than  of  any  other  church  func- 
tionary. 

The  man  who  catered  for  the  dead  was  discouraging. 

"Where  is  Doctor  G ?" 


160  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

"At  the  Centennial." 

"When  is  he  coming  home?" 

"Saturday  night." 

"Where  is  his  assistant?" 

"There  is  no  assistant." 

"None  at  all?" 

"No." 

"  Do  you  know  of  a  mission  to  be  held  here  next  week? " 

"No,  don't  know  anything  about  any  mission.  The  col- 
lections were  taken  some  time  ago." 

I  asked  if  there  was  no  one  in  the  city  who  could  give  me  in- 
formation about  the  church,  and  finally  he  gave  me  the  name  of 
an  insurance  agent,  who  he  said  was  a  "Deacon."  All  this 
was  discouraging  enough,  and  I  hurried  off  down  town  to  the 
address  given  me.     I  found  the  Deacon,  and  I  found  a  friend. 

"Do  you  know  anything  about  a  mission  to  be  held  in  your 
church  beginning  next  Sunday?" 

"No." 

"Don't  you  know  anything  at  all  about  a  man  named  Rains- 
ford  whom  Doctor  G has  invited  to  take  a  mission  for  a 

fortnight  in  St.  Peter's,  beginning  next  Sunday  morning?" 

"Never  heard  of  him,"  he  said,  cheerfully. 

"Well,  then,  I  might  as  well  go  back  to  New  York  this  eve- 
ning." 

"What  do  you  mean  by  a  mission?"  he  said,  becoming  in- 
terested. 

I  sat  down  and  talked  to  him  as  hard  as  I  could  for  about 
half  an  hour.     He  listened  to  all  I  said. 

"That's  about  the  thing  we  want  here." 

"But  if  there  has  been  no  preparation  at  all,  it  cannot  ac- 
complish much  in  a  fortnight." 

"Well,"  he  said,  "Doctor  G has  forgotten  all  about  it; 

that's  just  like  him.  He'll  not  be  back  till  the  eleven  o'clock 
train  Saturday  night.     But  this  is  God's  doing.     You  stay!" 

"But  what  can  I  expect  to  accomplish  without  any  prepara- 
tion?" 

"Do  anything  you  like;  I'll  back  you." 

Well,  there  was  not  much  I  could  do,  but  I  took  the  last 
dollars  I  had  in  the  world,  and,  going  to  a  newspaper  office, 
had  two  hundred  large  posters  printed  that  same  Wednesday 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  161 

night.  On  Thursday  morning  I  took  a  great  roll  of  these 
posters  under  my  arm,  and  succeeded  in  getting  them  placed 
in  the  windows  of  the  best  shops  in  Charles  Street.  Then  I 
tackled  the  street  railroads,  and  actually  had  the  authorities 
put  them  up  on  the  sides  of  the  Baltimore  street  cars.  There 
they  stayed,  and  it  did  not  cost  me  a  cent,  either.  I  never 
succeeded  in  getting  such  a  thing  done  in  any  city  again,  no, 
not  even  in  Baltimore,  when  I  held  another  mission  later  and 
was  much  better  known.     That  is  one  on  me. 

At  eleven  o'clock  Saturday  night,  back  came  Doctor  G . 

Mr.  Richardson,  the  Deacon,  and  I  were  in  the  rectory  waiting 
for  him.  He  was  just  as  hearty  as  he  could  be.  "Mr.  Rains- 
ford,  I  am  glad  to  see  you.  I  have  not  made  any  preparation; 
in  fact,  our  people  are  not  back  in  town  yet,  and  we  should 
have  chosen  a  later  date,  but  we  will  do  what  we  can  and  give 
you  a  good  send-off.  I  am  going  to  preach  Sunday  morning, 
and  I  have  asked  the  Bishop  to  preach  in  the  evening,  and  you 
will  begin  Monday." 

I  was  up  against  it  with  a  vengeance! 

"  Dear  Doctor  G , "  I  said,  "  I  have  only  come  here  to  help 

you,  but  I  cannot  agree  to  the  arrangement  that  you  preach  in 
the  morning  and  the  Bishop  in  the  evening.  I've  got  to  get 
hold  of  the  people  on  Sunday  if  I  am  to  reach  them  during  the 
week." 

"Mr.  Rainsford,  you  are  a  stranger  in  this  country;  you  do 
not  understand.  I  am  rector  of  this  church,  and  I  repeat,  I 
shall  preach  in  the  morning,  the  Bishop  in  the  evening,  and 
you  begin  Monday." 

"Dear  sir,"  I  said  again,  "I  came  here  to  help  the  church; 
I  have  no  other  aim.  I  came  at  your  invitation.  I  do  know 
my  own  business,  and  if  I  begin  the  way  you  suggest  the  mission 
will  be  a  failure.  No  doubt  you  are  going  to  preach  to-morrow 
morning,  and  the  Bishop  in  the  evening,  but  then  I  am  not 
going  to  preach  Monday." 

The  next  twenty  minutes  were  trying.  He  stormed  up  and 
down  his  study,  his  hat,  a  tall  silk  hat,  pushed  far  back  from 
his  forehead.  I  see  him  now.  I  sat  on  the  sofa  and  did  not 
say  one  word.  The  Deacon  did  the  fighting,  and  right  well  he 
did  it. 

At  the  end  of  quite  twenty  minutes  he  rushed  out,  saying  he 


1 62  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

had  no  idea  how  unreasonable  an  Englishman  could  be,  woke 
the  Bishop  up — it  was  long  after  midnight — and  asked  him  to  let 
him  off.  The  Bishop  I  fancy  was  naturally  offended;  he  never 
came  to  the  church  while  I  was  preaching.     But  I  had  my  way. 

This  was  not  exactly  an  encouraging  way  to  begin  my  first 
mission,  and  Sunday  was  wet  and  stormy;  but  I  preached  well, 
to  a  congregation  of  less  than  three  hundred,  in  a  church  that 
held  above  a  thousand.  I  was  not  seeking  my  own,  and  I 
felt  God  was  with  me. 

When  I  got  through  the  Doctor  said,  "You  did  a  great  deal 
better  than  I  expected;  you  will  make  a  preacher,  but  you  made 
one  mistake:  you  did  not  take  a  text." 

"Doctor,"  I  said,  "I  am  not  here  to  preach  sermons.  You 
have  been  taking  texts  and  preaching  better  sermons  than  I 
can  preach  all  these  years.  I  am  only  here  for  a  few  days.  I 
must  work  my  own  way." 

"Be  content  to  go  the  way  other  people  go,"  he  replied. 
"Do  not  do  that  sort  of  thing." 

I  preached  again  in  the  evening,  and  we  had  as  many  as  in 
the  morning.  The  Doctor  grumbled  again  because  I  took  no 
text.  On  Monday  as  many  came  as  on  Sunday,  and  by  Wed- 
nesday, the  church  was  three  quarters  full. 

The  old-fashioned  pulpit  at  St.  Peter's  then  stood  looking 
down  on  the  Holy  Table.  As  I  was  finishing  on  Wednesday 
evening  a  loud  sound  of  sobbing  rose  from  the  Communion 
Table  beneath  me,  and  looking  down,  I  saw  the  Doctor,  his 
head  in  his  hands,  kneeling,  crying  like  a  baby.  Before  I  could 
give  the  blessing,  he  hurried  down  the  aisle,  stood  at  the  door, 
his  arms  spread  wide,  and  in  a  loud  voice  cried  to  the  amazed 
congregation:  "Friends,  you  must  come  to  hear  this  young 
man.     He  is  preaching  the  Gospel  to  us  all." 

After  that  night  the  church  was  full.  That  was  my  first 
mission  in  the  United  States  and  never  can  I  forget  it.  Thus 
I  became  a  missioner,  and  went  to  many  places,  and  made 
many  friends  during  the  next  two  years.  What  kindness  I 
everywhere  received!  What  generous  allowances  were  made 
for  me!  I  gained  invaluable  experience,  seeing  many  classes 
of  people,  and  getting  to  know  the  country  as  I  could  not  have 
done  in  any  other  way. 

From  Baltimore  I  went  to  old-fashioned  Alexandria,  held 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  163 

a  mission  in  Washington's  church,  and,  for  the  first  time,  tasted 
Virginian  hospitality.  Then  to  Washington  with  Doctor 
Addison.  There  I  did  not  do  so  well.  Then  as  winter  was 
closing  in,  to  dear  old  Doctor  Newton,  at  Epiphany,  Phila- 
delphia, father  of  Heber  and  W.  Wilberforce  Newton. 

I  had  a  curious  experience  here,  illustrating  the  life  of  the 
city  at  the  time.  I  was  to  begin  my  work  at  Epiphany  on 
Sunday,  and  I  reached  the  town  Friday.  It  was  snowing 
heavily,  all  the  street  cars  were  blocked,  and  I  found  that 
Doctor  Newton  lived  at  Chestnut  Hill,  several  miles  away 
from  the  church.  After  quite  a  long  walk,  through  deep  snow, 
I  found  the  house.  No  response  to  my  knocking!  The  door 
was  unlocked  and  I  went  in.  I  heard  voices  upstairs.  They 
sounded  as  though  someone  wanted  help.  I  went  up  and 
found  Mrs.  Newton  bending  over  her  husband,  who,  the  day 
before,  had  slipped,  and  falling,  had  broken  his  arm.  Their 
single  servant  had  been  out  a  long  time  trying  to  find  a  doctor 
in  the  driving  storm.  I  volunteered  aid  and  began  my  mission 
there  and  then  by  hunting  in  the  very  scattered  suburb  for  a 
doctor.  I  had  a  long  and  hard  task,  but  finally  dragged  a 
medico  to  the  dear  old  man's  bedside  against  the  storm,  and  had 
the  satisfaction  of  seeing  the  broken  arm  set.  All  went  well. 
In  a  few  weeks  Doctor  Newton  was  out  again,  but  he  was  not 
of  much  help  to  me  during  the  next  ten  days  at  the  church. 

Most  of  the  churches  to  which  I  went  at  this  time  were  in 
difficulties;  that  was  the  reason  I  was  invited  to  them.  A 
mission  was  regarded  as  a  sort  of  religious  stimulant,  and 
stimulants  go  but  a  short  way  in  restoring  health,  either  in 
the  individual  or  the  organization.  No  missionary  visitor  can 
turn  a  weak  or  an  inefficient  ministry  into  a  strong  and  suc- 
cessful one.  A  mission  cannot  save  a  failing  church.  This  of 
course  I  knew  very  well.  But,  though  I  could  not  always  build 
up  the  churches  I  ministered  to,  I  everywhere  found  men  and 
women  waiting  to  be  helped,  anxious  to  speak  about  their 
doubts  and  troubles,  and  trying  to  get  in  touch  with  God.  I 
was  specially  careful  to  do  all  I  could  to  strengthen  the  hands 
of  the  rector  whose  guest  I  was,  and  in  my  many  visitations, 
to  many  states  and  cities,  I  can  say  truthfully,  I  won  and  re- 
tained the  friendship  of  every  man  who  invited  me,  excepting 
the  first,  Doctor in  New  York. 


164  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

The  gain  to  myself  during  these  two  years  was  great.  I 
learned  to  appreciate  an  American  audience,  learned  that 
American  audiences  spoil  you  for  any  other.  They  are  quicker 
to  respond  to  you,  more  charitable  to  your  failures,  more  ap- 
preciative of  anything  worth  while  you  have  to  offer,  than  any 
other  audience  (at  least  that  speaks  the  English  tongue).  Those 
two  years  of  happy  work  sowed  the  seed  of  Americanism  in 
me.  I  went  to  many  cities,  and  never  to  one  that  I  did  not 
regret  to  leave. 

Of  one  other  gain  I  made  I  must  speak.  I  gained  a  pro- 
found belief  that,  in  these  times,  as  truly  as  in  ancient  times, 
preaching  the  Gospel  was  the  way  of  the  power  of  God.  There 
never  was  a  time  when  people  were  more  ready  to  listen  to  that 
supremely  compelling  message,  man's  call  to  his  brother-man. 
Some  would  have  it  that  the  popular  magazine  has  taken  away 
the  preacher's  job.  A  thousand  times,  no!  None  of  them 
can  take  the  place  of  "the  King's  Messenger."  He  alone  it 
is  who,  face  to  face  with  his  fellows,  speaks  straight  from  his 
soul  to  theirs.  He  never  has,  he  never  will  lack  a  hearing,  for 
his  is  in  all  the  ages  the  tongue  of  fire. 

I  will  tell  a  story  of  a  modern  King's  Messenger,  condemned 
as  a  heretic,  by  the  way.  I  was  making  a  forty-eight-hours 
journey,  some  years  ago,  and,  by  the  middle  of  it,  got  to  know 
some  interesting  fellow-travellers  in  the  smoking  compartment 
of  our  Pullman.  (Great  places  are  Pullman  smoking  cars  for 
informing  talk!  Many  good  friends  I  have  made  in  them.) 
One  of  them,  an  elderly  man,  a  Chicagoan,  interested  me  greatly. 
It  seemed  we  had  a  good  deal  in  common.  So  of  course  we 
finally  got  talking  on  religion.  "I  was  thrown  into  the  city, 
almost  a  boy,"  he  said.  "I  had  to  fight,  anyway.  I  received 
no  mercy,  and  I  gave  none.  I  fought  and  made  good,  as  people 
say.  To-day  I  am  a  rich  man.  I  was  no  worse  and  no  better 
than  the  ordinary  business  man.  I  did  not  go  to  church.  I 
made  no  religious  profession.  One  night  at  a  friend's  table 
I  met  Doctor  Swing.  I  knew  he  had  been  tried  for  heresy,  and 
that  attracted  me  to  him.  What  he  said  was  new  to  me  and 
interested  me.  So  I  went  to  his  lectures,  Sundays.  He  had 
no  church  then.  After  I  had  been  going  to  hear  him  for  a  little, 
I  found  that — well,  somehow,  I  could  not  do  on  Monday  or 
Tuesday  some  of  the  things  in  business  I  had  till  then  done 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  165 

as  a  matter  of  course.  And  later  he  had  a  string  on  me  till 
Wednesday  or  Thursday.  And,  Mr.  Rainsford,  if  he  had 
lived,  I'd  have  joined  that  man's  church,  and  there  is  no  saying 
but  he'd  have  had  his  way  with  me  right  up  to  Saturday  night." 

I  was  so  impressed  with  this  story  and  the  way  it  was  told 
that  I  wrote  it  down  there  and  then.  I  cannot  on  cold  paper 
give  the  impression  it  made  on  me,  and  on  the  men  in  the  car 
who  heard  it.  It  was  one  of  the  most  real  things  I  ever  listened 
to.  Surely  the  King's  Messenger  had  reached  the  Chicago 
millionaire!  And  not  to  him  alone  did  he  deliver  his  message 
but  to  every  man  in  that  crowded  smoking  compartment.  That 
story  teller  was  a  preacher,  too,  and  passed  on  the  message  the 
King's  Messenger  had  delivered  to  him. 

The  missioner  is  the  loser  by  escaping  criticism.  He  leaves 
before  it  can  reach  him,  but  in  my  case,  I  underwent  a  discipline 
that  was  severe  enough.  I  think  it  did  me  good,  but  it  was 
bitter  medicine  at  the  time. 

I  received  an  invitation  to  speak  before  the  Church  Congress 
at  Boston,  on  "Missions."  I  don't  know  now  how  I  happened 
to  get  it.  I  did  not  know  anything  about  Church  Congresses. 
I  had  never  heard  of  one.  I  fancied  it  would  be  a  small  gather- 
ing of  clergy  and  laity  to  discuss  matters  of  interest.  So  I 
accepted.  I  had  something  to  say;  and  while  I  was  taking  a 
mission  at  Randolph  McKim's  church,  125th  Street  and  Fifth 
Avenue,  New  York,  I  made  the  best  preparation  I  could. 

The  Congress  met  in  the  Music  Hall,  the  hour  was  8  P.  m. 
I  reached  Boston  in  the  afternoon.  I  was  rather  fagged  and 
had  a  very  bad  headache  (an  unusual  thing  for  me).  I  went 
to  the  Music  Hall,  and  to  my  terror  found  a  great  platform 
already  crowded  with  religious  dignitaries,  clerical  and  lay, 
and  an  audience  of  some  two  thousand  people  on  the  floor. 
Father  Benson,  of  Oxford,  was  the  first  speaker.  He  was  to 
present  parochial  missions  from  the  High  Churchman's  view- 
point, I  from  the  low.  Father  Benson  was  a  poor  speaker; 
he  did  not  make  much  of  his  subject.     I  was  to  follow  him. 

What  struck  me  I  don't  know,  but  when  I  got  on  my  feet  the 
world  went  black!  I  could  see  nothing,  neither  my  notes  nor 
my  audience.  I  was  a  stranger,  standing  before  what  was 
perhaps  the  most  representative  audience  that  had  ever  come 
together  in  the  Episcopal  Church.     I  had  twenty-five  minutes 


1 66  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

allotted  me.  I  mumbled  and  stumbled  for  less  than  five,  said 
nothing  at  all,  and  in  a  cold  sweat  sat  me  down.  I  would  not 
wish  my  worst  enemy  to  have  to  endure  what  I  went  through 
during  the  next  two  hours.  At  last  I  was  dimly  aware 
that  the  benediction  had  been  given,  and  the  great  assemblage 
was  melting  away.  I  sat  on  my  chair  still,  in  a  numb  sort  of 
way.  Not  one  soul  did  I  know  in  the  crowd.  I  had  just  real- 
ized that  everything  was  over  and  that  I  must  go,  when  I  was 
aware  of  an  immense  bulk  of  a  man  standing  over  me.  He 
must  have  said  something  before  which  I  did  not  hear,  for 
now  I  felt  his  hand  touch  my  shoulder,  and  a  kindly  voice  say, 
"Mr.  Rainsford,  will  you  preach  for  me  next  Sunday  morning, 
in  Trinity  Church?"  That  was  my  first  meeting  with  Phillips 
Brooks.  I  was  too  numb  and  prostrate  at  the  moment  to 
realize  fully  the  thoughtful,  magnanimous  brotherliness  of 
his  act,  but  later  he  knew  that  he  had  won  that  night  a  lifelong 
devotion.  I  went  back  to  my  room  in  the  old  Parker  House  a 
pretty  sick  lad,  and  had  it  out  with  myself  and  God.  Had  I 
gone  to  that  Congress  seeking  popularity?  No!  I  had  told 
my  God  I  was  willing  to  fail  if  it  was  His  will,  and  I  had  failed. 
That  was  all  about  it.  So  after  a  time  I  went  to  sleep,  and  next 
day  had  no  headache. 

Next  Sunday  morning  I  preached  in  the  great  new  church 
just  then  finished.  There  was  a  crowd.  All  Boston  was  then 
at  Phillips  Brooks's  feet,  and  the  presence  of  a  strange  Irish- 
English  youth  in  his  place  was  manifestly  an  unwelcome 
surprise  to  many.  Some  got  up  and  went  out.  A  few  read 
hymn-books,  and  one  irate  old  gentleman,  who  sat  just  in 
front  of  me,  relieved  his  feelings  with  a  newspaper.  I  had  a 
bad  time.     So  had  they. 

Seldom  a  year  passed  after  this,  till  Phillips  Brooks  became 
Bishop  of  Massachusetts,  that  I  did  not  preach  for  him,  and  a 
good  friend  he  was  to  me.  In  those  earlier  years  he  had  no 
understanding  of,  or  sympathy  with,  the  free  and  open  church. 
Later  he  very  completely  changed  his  mind,  and,  when  he 
visited  me  at  St.  George's,  shortly  after  his  election,  he  said, 
"I  will  do  all  that  I  can  to  make  every  church  in  Massachusetts 
free.  You  have  been  right  all  along."  I  shall  have  more  to 
say  about  Phillips  Brooks  later.  I  grew  to  love  him.  He  was 
strangely  lonely,  a  man  who  found  it  impossible  to  reveal,  even 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  167 

to  his  few  intimates,  his  own  inner  self,  and  who  in  consequence 
of  that  inability  could  not  and  did  not  draw  out  the  inner  selves 
of  those  he  led  and  inspired  by  his  preaching.  Dr.  A.  V.  G. 
Allen,  his  biographer,  would  make  him  a  great  man  all  round. 
This  he  was  not.  He  was  no  organizer,  poor  debater,  not  a 
liturgist,  and  he  had  no  aptitude  for  dealing  with  the  wants 
and  woes  of  men  outside  the  pulpit.  But  he  did  one  thing 
supremely  well:  he  was  a  great  preacher,  and  that  surely  is 
enough  greatness  for  any  man. 

Three  years  after  this,  when  I  was  in  distress  and  doubt  at 
Toronto,  I  wrote  to  him,  telling  something  of  my  trouble,  and 
asking  if  I  might  come  to  him  for  a  night.  I  had  a  kind  note 
by  next  mail,  and  I  went  to  Boston  and  unburdened  my  soul 
as  best  I  could,  as  we  sat  alone  on  the  night  of  my  arrival.  "  I 
wanted  you  to  come,"  said  Brooks,  and  then  he  added  kindly, 
generous  words  of  confidence  in  me,  "  but  I  can't  help  you.  Go 
back  and  fight  it  out.  You'll  win."  He  could  not  help  me 
my  way;  he  certainly  did  help  me  his  way,  and  I  went  back  glad 
I  had  taken  the  journey  to  see  him. 

On  the  floor  of  the  General  Convention,  Brooks  was,  of 
course,  listened  to  with  the  utmost  respect,  but  that  he  was 
not  at  home  there  any  one  could  see.  He  had  no  faculty  in 
reading  the  temper  of  "the  House."  When  he  spoke  "he 
preached"  at  it,  and  did  not  usually  gain  votes. 

I  sat  behind  him  once  when  the  important  matter  of  the 
revision  and  enlargement  of  the  Prayer-Book  was  under  de- 
bate. A  motion  was  before  the  house  to  permit  an  optional 
use  of  the  Beatitudes,  instead  of  the  Commandments,  at  the 
Holy  Communion  office,  once  in  the  month.  The  motion 
seemed  likely  to  pass,  as  very  many  felt  the  fitness  of  prefacing 
the  ordinance  with  the  Lord's  Beatitudes  rather  than  Moses' 
law.  Had  it  passed,  it  would  have  been  a  great  boon.  Phillips 
Brooks  rose  to  speak.  As  he  did  so,  Arthur  Brooks,  his 
brother,  whispered  something.  At  it  Phillips  Brooks  shook 
his  head  and  plunged  forward  in  a  torrent  of  words.  "Why 
not  trust  the  clergy?  Why  ever  and  always  tie  up  the  clergy 
with  unnecessary  restrictions?  Why  not  trust  the  man  ap- 
pointed to  lead  the  flock,  to  feed  the  flock?"  So  on  and  so 
on,  eloquently.  "Why  only  allow  an  optional  use  of  the 
Beatitudes  once  a  month?    Why  not  always  an  optional  use?" 


168  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Arthur  Brooks,  who  was  an  unusually  able  debater,  said  in  an 
aside  to  me,  "Phillips  has  defeated  the  whole  thing,"  and  so  he 
had.  The  timid  majority  took  counsel  of  their  fears,  and 
promptly  left  the  Ten  Commandments  where  they  were — and 
unfortunately  still  remain. 

When  it  was  not  a  question  of  debate,  the  sheer  power  of  his 
eloquence  would  sometimes  move  and  shake  his  listeners.  I 
remember  one  remarkable  instance  of  this  which  has  not  been 
printed  in  the  "Life."  It  was  at  a  Church  Congress,  and 
Brooks  was  pleading  for  a  more  elastic  conception  of  the  ser- 
vice. "A  clergy  muzzled  as  we  were  could  not  effectively 
serve  our  time,"  and  then  he  went  on  torrentem — "I  was 
seated  on  the  floor  of  the  General  Convention  of  our  church 
when  the  terrible  news  came  to  us  over  the  wire,  'Chicago  is 
burning.'  The  presiding  Bishop  called  the  Convention  to 
prayer  and,  both  houses  united,  knelt  before  God.  The 
Bishop  searched  in  the  Prayer-Book  for  some  office  that  fitted 
the  occasion,  and,  after  a  pause,  bade  us  join  with  him  in  the 
Litany,  a  noble  prayer,  consecrated  by  the  usage  of  ages;  a 
prayer  in  which  the  wants  and  hopes  of  countless  millions 
have  found  expression,  and  yet,  sir!  perhaps  the  only  woe  with 
with  which  the  Litany  does  not  deal  is  the  woe  of  a  burning  city." 

How  well  I  remember  the  charm  of  Boston  in  those  days. 
My  mission  at  St.  Paul's  meant  for  me  a  welcome  to  much 
that  was  quite  new  in  this  country.  Robert  C.  Winthrop, 
then  I  think  representing  Massachusetts  in  Congress,  asked  me 
first  to  dinner,  and  then  insisted  that  I  stay  at  his  house.  There 
I  met  what  was  best  worth  meeting  in  the  city.  Mr.  Winthrop 
was  the  first  great  citizen  that  I  had  come  to  know.  I  spent 
more  than  one  evening  alone  with  him.  He  paid  me  the  com- 
pliment of  explaining  his  views  on  the  status  of  the  coloured 
people,  and  on  what  should  be  the  educational  policy  of  the 
Government,  and  he  did  this  as  an  older  officer,  soon  to  retire 
from  service,  might  do  it  to  a  younger,  only  entering  on  his 
career.1 


Slavery  is  but  half  abolished,  emancipation  is  but  half  complete,  while  millions  of  freemen, 
with  votes  in  their  hands,  are  left  without  education.  Justice  to  them,  the  welfare  of  the  states 
in  which  they  live,  the  safety  of  the  whole  Republic,  the  dignity  of  the  elective  franchise — all 
alike  demand  that  the  still  remaining  bonds  of  ignorance  shall  be  unloosed  and  broken,  and  that 
the  minds  as  well  as  the  bodies  of  the  emancipated  go  free. — Robert  C.  Winthrop. 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  169 

I  had  been  living  from  hand  to  mouth.  Rushing  all  over 
the  country  from  one  mission  to  another,  giving  out,  to  the 
point  of  exhaustion,  such  poor  little  stuff  as  there  was  in  me 
to  give.  To  sit  at  the  feet  of  such  a  man  for  even  a  few  hours, 
to  feel  he  liked  me,  and  in  spite  of  my  collapse  at  the  Church 
Congress,  where  he  sat  on  the  platform,  believed  in  me,  in  my 
work,  and  in  my  future  usefulness;  and  proved  that  belief  by 
having  me  meet,  at  his  table,  the  best  in  Boston — well,  it  meant 
more  than  I  can  say! 

Mr.  Winthrop  put  me  up  for  the  Somerset  Club,  and  Russell 
Sturgis  seconded  me.  Talk  of  Boston  being  cold!  I  was  only 
a  stranger,  but  Boston  surely  "  took  me  in,"  in  spite  of  my,  to  it, 
outworn  Evangelical  theology;  and  while  Mr.  Winthrop  lived, 
I  was  more  at  home  there  than  in  any  city  in  the  United  States. 

Twenty-eight  years  after,  this  letter  came  to  me  from  William 
Newton,  the  then  rector  of  St.  Paul's.  William  Newton  had 
just  heard  of  my  resignation  from  St.  George's.  I  was  then  in 
Africa. 

My  dear  Rainsford, — 

My  heart  goes  out  to  you  in  that  you  have  had  to  travel  over  the  same  hard, 
disheartening  road  that  I  have  trod.  Your  work  and  service  are  monumental. 
There  has  been  nothing  like  it  in  the  history  of  the  American  Church.  But 
you  know  "Then  cometh  the  end,"  and  it  is  given  to  you  at  least  to  live  long 
enough  to  see  and  rejoice  in  the  fruits  of  your  labours. 

How  well  I  remember  when  you  first  came  to  Father,  a  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  Evange- 
list, with  a  big  Bible  under  your  left  arm.1 

Do  you  remember  the  mission  you  had  for  me  at  St.  Paul's,  when  you  preached 
about  the  "scrub  oaks,"  and  made  extempore  prayers  from  the  pulpit?  Do 
you  remember  out  two  confessional  rooms  on  either  side  of  the  chancel,  like 
Zamacoes'  picture  of  the  two  confessors? — you  with  a  long  line  of  fair  peni- 
tents, and  I  with  an  old  maid  or  two?  Ringold  was  acting  at  the  Boston 
theatre  in  Henry  V,  at  that  time,  and  the  same  girls  came  in  the  afternoon 
to  see  "  Rainsford 's  smile,"  and  then  went  at  night  to  see  Ringold 's  kiss  to 
Katherine. 

Let  me  throw  in  these  pleasantries  in  the  heart  of  a  loyal,  loving  letter.  I 
do  not  know  when  or  where,  if  ever,  this  letter  will  reach  you,  but  if  it  ever 
does  get  to  you,  remember  that  it  comes  with  a  soul  full  of  love  and  affection 
from  one  who  is  not  unmindful  of  the  sweet  hours  of  yesterday.  God's  bless- 
ing sustain  you  and  give  you  calm. 

Ever  affectionately, 
William  Wilberforce  Newton. 

Feb.  9,  1906. 

^his  refers  to  the  visit  to  Philadelphia  I  have  spoken  of. 


170  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

When  Randolph  McKim  of  Washington  died  in  July,  1920, 
the  last  of  the  brotherly  band  I  knew  in  the  '7o's  passed  away. 
How  hospitable,  how  generous  they  were  to  me,  a  stranger 
within  their  gates.  In  Sandusky  in  bleak  midwinter,  or  in 
sunny  New  Orleans;  in  Boston  or  in  Richmond,  everywhere  it 
was  the  same.  I  cannot  recall  one  unpleasant  incident  or  one 
unkind  word  during  those  two  full  years.  And,  looking  back- 
ward, for  one  thing  at  least  I  am  confidently  thankful:  I 
never  left  one  of  their  churches  weaker  for  my  visit  to  it. 

In  the  early  winter  of  1878,  I  took  a  mission  in  London, 
Ontario,  which  was  unusually  successful,  and  this  led  to  my 
being  invited  to  Toronto.  There  my  work  developed  into 
something  more  than  a  mission;  it  led  ultimately  to  my  living 
in  Toronto  for  four  years.  I  must  speak  at  length  of  Toronto 
and  my  work  there,  for  it  decided  my  future. 

The  Cathedral  Church  of  St.  James,  by  the  vestry  of  which 
I  was  invited,  was  a  large  and  unusually  fine  church  very  well 
endowed.  It  held  in  Toronto  somewhat  the  same  position 
that  long  ago  Trinity  held  in  New  York. 

Dean  Grassett  was  a  man  of  culture,  refinement,  and  con- 
siderable learning,  a  graduate  of  Oxford,  and  a  pronounced 
Evangelist.  He  was  an  old  man  failing  rapidly,  and  at  this 
time  was  sometimes  incapable  of  any  active  work.  The  vestry 
was  an  unusually  strong  representative  body  of  men.  Parish 
affairs  fell  more  and  more  into  their  hands.  When  the  Dean 
could  not  preach,  they  supplied  the  pulpit,  and  their  insistence 
it  was  that  brought  me  to  the  town. 

There  had  been  no  religious  movement  in  Canada  such  as 
Mr.  Moody  had  been  associated  with  in  this  country  and  in 
England.  The  people  were  ready  for  such  a  movement,  the 
time  was  ripe  for  it  when  I  went  to  Canada.  I  did  not  bring 
it,  yet  it  came  by  me. 

From  the  very  first  it  was  evident  that  the  spirit  of  God 
was  moving  the  consciences  of  men.  Nowhere  before,  in  any 
place  or  at  any  time,  had  I  seen  anything  like  it.  From  the 
start  the  crowds  were  enormous.  Several  thousands  were 
turned  away  nightly  from  the  door.  There  was  no  undue 
excitement;  masses  waited  in  the  deep  snow  till  the  doors  were 
opened  and  then,  with  an  orderliness  that  was  extraordinary, 
quietly  took  seats  or  standing  room. 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  171 

Under  the  circumstances  I  felt  the  danger  of  excitement,  and 
made  no  attempt  to  hold  any  after-meetings,  or  speak  to  in- 
dividuals, till  I  had  been  preaching  twice  a  day  for  a  fortnight. 
There  was  a  large  Sunday-school  room  across  the  churchyard 
that  would  seat  six  hundred,  and  to  check  mere  emotionalism 
I  had  the  first  after-meeting  there,  not  in  the  church. 

I  said,  one  evening  after  the  sermon:  "If  there  are  any 
present  who  wish  to  talk  with  me  on  matters  of  personal  religion, 
if  they  will  go  into  the  Sunday-school  room  I  will  meet  them 
there."  I  waited  some  time,  and  when  I  went  into  the  room 
I  found  between  five  and  six  hundred  people  on  their  knees. 
There  was  no  crying,  no  excitement,  but  a  silence  that  could  be 
felt.  I  may  say  that  the  effects  of  that  work  were  largely 
permanent.  Men  known  and  respected  in  the  city  openly 
professed  conversion,  lived  up  to  their  confession  for  many 
years,  and  are  living  so  to-day. 

One  of  the  first  converts  became  mayor  of  the  city  next  year, 
and  a  right  good  mayor  he  made.  Some  of  the  dearest  friends 
man  ever  had  clasped  my  hand  and  mingled  their  prayers  and 
praises  with  mine  in  that  Sunday-school  room. 

In  large  numbers  people  came  forward  to  join,  not  St. 
James's  alone,  but  other  churches  as  well.  At  the  end  of  a 
month  my  mission  was  over.  I  had  turned  my  "barrel"  in- 
side out,  said  my  last  say,  preached  my  last  sermon,  and  was 
prepared  to  return  to  the  United  States  for  a  short  time  before 
taking  a  rest  that  I  felt  both  my  mind  and  my  nerves  badly 
needed;  but  it  was  not  to  be. 

The  men  whose  insistence  brought  me  there  came  to  me 
again,  and  many  others  now  joined  them.  "You  must  not  go. 
Can  any  doubt  that  this  is  God's  work?  Stay  with  us.  Canada 
wants  you.  The  doctors  have  ordered  the  Dean  to  take 
absolute  rest  in  England  for  four  months.  For  so  long  a  time 
stay  with  us,  and  build  up  and  strengthen  the  work  that  it  has 
been  given  you  by  God  to  do." 

I  felt  that  this  was  indeed  a  divine  call  for  me.  I  must  trust 
my  Lord  for  daily  bread,  and  feed  as  best  I  could  the  hungry 
flock  that  gathered  round  me. 

The  Toronto  clergy,  with  one  or  two  notable  exceptions, 
were  not  cordial,  and  I  did  not  blame  them.  St.  James's  itself 
was  not  popular  with  the  other  Episcopal  churches,  because  it 


i72  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

was  absorbing,  or  rather  its  rector  was  absorbing,  the  whole 
of  the  very  large  endowment  that  was  intended  to  promote  the 
well-being,  not  of  one  but  of  all  the  Anglican  churches  in  the 
town.  Then  the  suddenness  of  the  religious  awakening,  the 
crowding  of  the  people  from  other  churches  to  hear  the  new 
voice — these  things  could  not  make  for  popularity. 

I  had  then  little  help  or  advice  from  my  clerical  brethren. 
But  if  not  from  them,  I  had  what  I  needed  from  a  son  of  the 
Dean,  George  Grassett.  He  had  been  a  fellow-student  with  me 
at  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge;  we  lived  indeed  on  the  same 
staircase.  In  those  earlier  days  he  was  rather  openly  non- 
religious,  and  never  came  to  our  Evangelical  meetings;  but  he 
was  transparently  an  honest,  clever,  and  witty  man,  as  well  as 
a  sound  scholar,  and  we  saw  a  good  deal  of  each  other.  He 
was  profoundly  influenced  by  the  mission,  and  being  then  in 
poor  health,  unable  to  do  any  active  work,  he  did  what  he  alone 
could  do,  and  what  I  sorely  needed:  he  coached,  criticized, 
and  helped  me.  His  younger  brother,  Arthur  Grassett,  was 
my  companion  on  the  ice  and  at  the  tennis  net,  and  the  loving 
friendship  of  both  these  men  is  one  of  the  things  I  am  proudest 
of  in  all  my  life.  They  saw  a  mere  boy,  a  stranger,  coming  to 
the  great  church  which  for  forty  years  (I  think)  their  loved 
father  had  presided  over;  filling  his  place  with  great  crowds  he 
never  had  had,  for  four  consecutive  months,  pushing  old 
habits  and  precedents  aside.  And  they  took  this  stranger  in 
as  though  he  were  a  brother.  I  lived  at  the  deanery  with  them 
for  those  four  months,  and  no  unkind  word,  no  taint  of  jeal- 
ousy, that  I  can  remember,  ever  marred  our  brotherly  inter- 
course. 

There  was  a  clever  little  weekly  comic  paper  published  in 
Toronto,  the  Grip.  Its  chief  feature  was  a  full-page  cartoon, 
and  before  the  weekly  issue  was  in  the  hands  of  the  public,  this 
cartoon  was  always  spread  on  the  wall,  before  the  eyes  of  all 
who  walked  crowded  King  Street.  Shortly  before  I  sailed  for 
England,  I  was  dumfounded  one  day  to  see  myself  as  a  gigantic 
Red  Indian,  on  Grip's  signboard,  an  immense  row  of  heavy 
scalp-locks  stretching  from  the  back  of  my  head  (Indian-chief- 
wise)  down  my  back  to  the  ground.  Looking  closer,  the  scalp- 
locks  resolved  themselves  into  slippers.  Underneath,  in  large 
capitals,  was  printed:     "In  slippery  places"  and  in  smaller 


AN  ALIEN  MISSIONER  173 

lettering  at  the  bottom,  "A  reverend  gentleman  is  reported  to 
have  received  440  pair." 

The  whole  thing  was  very  funny,  but  to  be  accurate,  they 
should  have  let  me  off  439,  for  though  my  ground  was  in  truth 
slippery,  I  had  received  just  one  pair.  I  have  often  wondered 
how  I  managed  not  to  do  foolish  things  then,  for  I  have  done 
them  so  often  since. 

I  parted  with  the  people  of  Toronto  at  the  end  of  those 
wonderful  four  months.  And  what  was  my  life  work  to  be? 
That  was  the  question.  I  felt  it  was  not  to  be  in  England;  and 
yet,  here  I  was  tearing  myself  away  from  Toronto,  the  place 
and  the  people  suggesting  home  to  me,  who  was  beginning  to 
grow  weary  of  wandering. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
A  Dark  Night — and  a  Glorious  Morning 
Toronto,  1 878-1 880 

He  fought  his  doubts  and  gathered  strength, 

He  would  not  make  his  judgment  blind, 
He  faced  the  spectres  of  the  mind 

And  laid  them;  thus  he  came  at  length 

To  find  a  stronger  faith  his  own; 
And  Power  was  with  him  in  the  night. 

— Tennyson. 

Not  in  his  goals  but  in  his  transitions  man  is  great.     The  truest 
state  of  mind  rested  in,  becomes  false. — R.  W.  Emerson. 

I  was  married  in  April  to  Emily  Alma  Green,  third  daughter 
of  Frederick  Green,  of  Prince's  Gardens,  London. 

Neither  my  wife  nor  I  was  in  very  good  health.  She  had 
devoted  herself  to  nursing  her  father,  who  was  blind,  through 
a  tedious  illness — he  had  died  the  year  before — and  I  was  still 
extremely  nervous,  and  a  bad  sleeper.  We  went  to  Southern 
Europe  for  six  weeks,  and  had  a  never-to-be-forgotten  good 
time.     There  is  only  one  honeymoon  in  a  man's  life. 

My  wife  and  her  younger  sister  had  rented  a  small  house 
in  London,  and  there  after  our  rest  we  returned  to  live.  I 
had  saved  $3,000  during  my  two  years  of  mission  preaching,  and 
so  was  not  hampered  for  funds.  Money  went  far  then  and  we 
lived  simply. 

I  soon  felt  that  England  was  not  for  me.  There  were  already 
gathering  a  band  of  men  who  must  have  stood  about  where  I  did. 
They  grew  into  the  Broad  Church  Party,  but  I  knew  none  of 
them.  I  had  been  shut  into  the  narrow  enclosure  of  the  Evan- 
gelical fold,  and  there  was  not  at  that  time  the  mingling  of 
parties,  the  live-and-let-let-live  spirit  you  find  to-day. 

174 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     175 

No  one  at  home  approved  of  my  overseas  doings,  and  I  really 
do  not  think  I  made  a  fair  presentment  of  them.  I  wanted  to 
stop  preaching — I  did  not  quite  know  why  myself — and  refused 
many  invitations  to  pulpits.  I  did  not  understand  my  own 
condition  at  all.  I  was  like  a  crab  changing  its  shell,  a  ticklish 
business.  All  the  more  so  because  I  did  not  yet  realize  that 
the  old  shell  must  go  or  the  crab  would  die. 

I  settled  down  in  my  wife's  house  for  a  time,  but  the  future 
was  uncertain.  I  studied  the  thirty-nine  articles  of  the  Church 
of  England  again  and  again,  and  the  more  I  read  them  the  less 
I  liked  them,  and  the  surer  I  felt  that  I  could  not  give  to  them 
an  honest  assent.  One  thing  I  could  do:  I  could  read,  and  I 
could  study.  While  missionizing  this  had  been  impossible. 
And  I  read. 

How  strange  it  is  that  in  our  minds,  as  in  our  bodies,  we 
assimilate  and  make  part  of  ourselves  only  those  things  that 
we  are  ready  for.  We  think  we  have  gained  what  the  teacher 
in  our  hand  has  to  give;  we  may  have  listened  carefully  to  all 
he  has  to  say,  and  yet  not  have  taken  one  single  grain  of  corn 
out  of  his  sheaf.  And  more,  what  he  says  we  may  have  un- 
derstood and  appreciated,  yet  somewhere  within  us,  it  stays 
packed  away,  quite  unused — a  bundle  on  top  of  our  backs,  not 
blood  and  muscle  strengthening  our  backbones. 

How  often  have  I  noticed  this  in  my  young  clergy,  or  in  the 
people  who  came  to  me  for  help!  I  would  name  a  book  that 
had  been  helpful  to  me;  hopefully  they  would  tackle  it,  study 
it,  remember  it,  and  get  no  help  or  light  out  of  it — not  at  the 
time,  anyway.  Such  experiences  I  understood  in  later  years, 
for  in  earlier  days  they  had  been  my  own. 

A  new  idea  came  to  me  at  this  time.  I  suppose  it  was  not 
my  own  idea  at  all,  but  so  far  as  I  was  conscious,  it  came  as  the 
result  of  my  own  Bible  study.  "God's  Revelation  must  be 
more  than  a  Book.  No  book,  however  great,  could  contain  it." 
When  I  examined  the  Book  itself,  I  saw  in  it  signs  of  progress. 
The  God  of  the  Pentateuch,  the  tribal  God  of  the  days  when 
Israel  struggled  toward  nationhood,  and  dutifully  put  to  whole- 
sale massacre  those  opposed  to  them,  was  not  the  God  of  the 
greatest  of  the  Psalmists,  who  sang  a  nobler  song,  "The  earth 
is  the  Lord's  and  the  fulness  thereof,  the  world,  and  they  that 
dwell  therein."     (Psalms  24.)     And  even  the  splendour  of  that 


i76  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

man's  vision  as  he  cries,  "Lift  up  your  heads,  O  ye  gates,  and 
be  ye  lift  up,  ye  everlasting  doors,  and  the  King  of  Glory  shall 
come  in,"  lacks  the  soul  appeal  of  Isaiah,  an  even  greater  poet 
preacher  than  he:  "The  spirit  of  the  Lord  God  is  upon  me, 
because  the  Lord  hath  anointed  me  to  preach  good  tidings 
unto  the  meek.  He  hath  sent  me  to  bind  up  the  broken- 
hearted, to  proclaim  liberty  to  the  captives,  the  opening  of  the 
prison  to  them  that  are  bound.  To  proclaim  the  acceptable 
year  of  the  Lord,  and  the  day  of  the  vengeance  of  our  God;  to 
comfort  all  that  mourn."     (Is.  lxi,  1-2.) 

Then  comes  the  Master  himself,  and  quoting  this  passage 
from  Isaiah  deliberately  leaves  out  the  sentence,  "the  day  of 
vengeance  of  our  God."  Here  in  the  Bible  itself,  then,  the 
idea  of  God  changes  and  rises,  and  the  change  was  continuous; 
more  important  still,  Jesus  was  recorded  as  saying  that  the 
continuous  and  changing  quality  in  it  would  not  cease  with 
him.  "I  have  many  things  to  say  to  you,  but  ye  cannot  bear 
them  now.  But  when  he,  the  spirit  of  truth  is  come,  he  will 
guide  you  into  all  truth;  he  will  shew  you  things  to  come.  It 
is  expedient  for  you  that  I  go  away."  (John,  xvi,  12,  13,  7.) 
Here  was  growth  and  change  indeed.  Here  was  evolution  in 
Religion. 

It  sounds  so  simple  now,  and  some  of  my  readers  may  ques- 
tion the  need  of  going  over  such  well-trodden  ground,  and  the 
repetition  here  of  accepted  conclusions;  but  I  would  repeat 
what  I  said  in  my  introduction:  I  am  not  writing  for  scholars 
or  advanced  thinkers,  but  for  the  same  sort  of  men  and  women 
as  those  I  knew — men  who  worked  hard  and  women  who  kept 
the  home — and  such  do  not  even  yet,  many  of  them,  understand 
the  all-important  place  evolution  takes  and  must  in  the  future 
take  in  forming  and  reforming  our  religious  ideas.  Con- 
sequently they  cannot  help  their  children  as  they  should;  and 
children  of  religious  parents  in  throngs  are  going  forth  from 
their  homes  rejecting  old  forms  of  the  Faith,  and  unable  to 
formulate  new.  I  shall  have  more  to  say  later  on  this  subject. 
I  must  be  forgiven  if  I  often  and  with  many  illustrations  in- 
sist on  it.  Teaching  and  preaching  it  I  got  new  light  myself, 
and  I  found  I  gave  help  to  others. 

If  the  ministry  of  the  Christian  church  is,  as  St.  Paul  says, 
"to  commend  the  Gospel  to  every  man's  conscience  in  the 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     177 

sight  of  God,"  then  it  must  be  explained  in  terms  of  a  divine 
evolution  rather  than  in  terms  of  a  divine  revelation.  People 
will  attach  the  idea  of  the  supernatural  to  revelation,  and 
man's  mind  is  increasingly  protesting  against  the  supernatural. 
There  is  no  such  thing  as  the  supernatural.  The  word  explains 
nothing  (a  moving  point  in  human  ignorance).  What  is  super- 
natural to  one  age  is,  to  the  next,  as  simple  as  common  arith- 
metic. 

I  was  far  from  understanding  all  this  then,  but  I  had  at  last 
got  a  clue  to  much  that  had  hitherto  puzzled  me.  If  the 
Bible  was  the  record  of  a  growing,  changing  idea  of  God; 
if  Jesus  taught  that  His  Spirit  would  lead  men  after  he  was 
dead  into  larger  and  newer  truth;  then  surely  it  was  open  to  the 
Church  to  modify  customs  and  services  as  the  needs  of  the  time 
required,  and  the  change  from  an  earlier  usage  to  a  later  was 
defensible  and  necessary.  Thus  the  idea  of  growth  in  religion 
helped  me  out  of  some  of  my  earlier  "growing  pains."  For 
instance,  infant  baptism  might  not  have  been  the  custom  in 
the  time  of  the  Apostles,  and  yet  might  have  become,  quite 
naturally,  the  custom  of  the  Church  at  a  later  time. 

But  when  I  was  asked  to  explain  how  I  justified  my  change 
of  mind,  I  found  myself  in  worse  trouble  than  I  had  been  be- 
fore; for  among  my  friends,  indeed  among  all  the  orthodox, 
anything  suggesting  evolution  in  religion  was,  in  1878,  double- 
dyed  heresy.  I  found  no  living  teacher  to  help  me,  but  one 
who  was  dead  gave  a  message  to  me.  The  loneliest  prophet 
of  our  modern  time  was  F.  W.  Robertson,  and,  in  the  English 
Church,  certainly  the  greatest. 

I  had  an  illustration,  many  years  after  this,  of  how  Robert- 
son had  influenced  my  preaching.  At  two  o'clock  one  morning 
the  rectory  bell  rang,  and  kept  ringing  till  it  woke  me.  A 
messenger  from  the  New  York  Hospital,  on  West  16th  Street, 
was  outside,  saying  that  a  dying  woman  wanted  to  see  me  im- 
mediately. I  dressed  hastily  and  went  with  him.  I  found  a 
woman  of  some  sixty  years.  There  were  few  signs  of  death 
about  her  or  the  room  she  lay  in.  Beautiful  flowers  were  there, 
and  in  her  pale  peaceful  face,  and  through  the  undimmed  eyes 
that  steadily  looked  into  mine,  there  shone  a  perfect  peace. 
"  You  see,"  she  said,  "  I  lack  for  nothing.  I  have  been  gover- 
ness for  years  to  (she  mentioned  important  people  of  New 


178  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

York),  and  the  children  have  been  here  all  the  time,  and  have 
surrounded  me  with  every  comfort.  I  have  been  coming  to 
St.  George's  for  a  long  time,  but  I  did  not  give  you  my  name, 
for  I  did  not  need  your  service.  Now  I  have  only  a  very  few 
hours  to  live,  but  I  could  not  die  without  telling  you  that  the 
man  who  is  an  inspiration  to  you  was  the  man  who  led  me  to 
my  Saviour  in  Brighton  forty  years  ago.  I  have  never  heard 
you  name  him,  but  your  sermons  breathe  his  spirit,  and  I  know 
you  would  love  to  hear  this,  so  I  could  not  die  without  telling 
you.     God  bless  you.     Good-night." 

Jesus  can  make  the  dying  bed 
Feel  soft  as  downy  pillows  are. 

I  went  over  my  own  sermon  notes,  those  I  had  used  during 
my  four  months  in  Toronto.  They  were  good  of  their  kind, 
carefully  worked  out  and  illustrated  with  telling  things  in  them; 
and  speaking  from  those  notes,  which  had  cost  me  much 
thought  and  preparation,  I  had  been  used  to  help  many  people. 
I  was  not  flattering  myself.  So  much  was  true.  Yet  the 
more  I  read  my  old  sermons  the  less  I  liked  them.  I  studied 
and  thought,  trying  to  find  out  what  was  the  matter  with  me 
or  with  them.  At  last  I  saw,  and  the  seeing  startled  me. 
My  own  idea  of  God  was  changing.  Even  the  dear  Companion 
God  of  my  mother  was  changing.  He  whose  chief  purpose  was 
the  rewarding  of  His  own  special  faithful  ones,  He  who  was 
partiality  embodied^  watching  over,  guarding,  saving  some, 
letting  the  greater  mass  rot  in  ignorance  and  sin — that  God 
I  could  preach  no  longer.  But  what  of  the  Bible's  teaching  to 
the  contrary? 

I  remembered  Luther's  magnificent  challenge:  "Verses  of  the 
Bible  don't  make  the  slightest  difference  to  me;  I  appeal  to  the 
Lord  who  is  King  of  Scripture."  (Erlanger,  Ed.  63,  157.) 
Many  will  say  that  the  faith  I  have  described  as  mine,  and  the 
Creed  I  am  protesting  against  as  at  this  time  intolerable  to  me 
are  caricatures  of  the  message  and  belief  which  the  Evangelical 
party,  and  indeed  all  parties  except  the  Unitarians,  held  and 
proclaimed.  I  cannot  agree  to  this.  Though  my  mind  was 
immature  and  my  scholarship  superficial,  I  had  been  in  con- 
stant touch,  both  privately  and  in  public,  with  many  of  the 
leaders  of  that  party.     My  dear  father  was  one  of  the  most 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     179 

influential  of  them;  and  as  to  my  own  work,  I  had  for  five 
years  constantly  addressed  large  audiences;  and  when  what  I 
preached  was  criticized,  it  was  on  the  ground  that  I  was  too 
radical,  too  much  inclined  to  latitudinarianism.  No,  I  am  not 
caricaturing  what  was  accepted  as  the  popular  gospel,  either  in 
England  or  in  America,  at  that  time.  Doctor  Tyng  (senior) 
in  New  York,  and  the  scholarly  Canon  Conway  of  Westminster, 
Simion  at  Cambridge,  and  hundreds  of  other  lesser  men,  in 
pulpits  and  on  platforms,  all  treated  the  gospel  of  Jesus  in  the 
same  way,  all  held  generally  to  the  same  sort  of  a  God. 

The  fact  is  that  a  younger  generation  finds  it  hard  to  realize 
the  cataclysmic  change  a  general  acceptance,  however  partial, 
of  the  evolutionary  hypothesis  has  effected  in  religious  belief. 
Doctrines  popularly  accepted  are  no  longer  thinkable;  educated 
people  will  not  discuss  them.  But  just  because  they  are  no 
longer  living  issues,  we  are  apt  to  undervalue  the  work  done  for 
God  and  man,  by  the  brave  soldiers  of  a  less  enlightened  day. 
We  may  know  more  of  nature,  and  so  more  of  God  (I,  of  course, 
include  man  in  nature),  but  have  we  the  fine  hardihood,  the 
directness,  simpleness,  and  understandableness  of  those  men's 
appeal?  "This  one  thing  I  do."  "This  one  way  I  go." 
"This  one  Master  I  serve."  "He  can  and  will  save  you  from 
your  sins."  "Save  you  from  hell,  save  you  for  Heaven." 
"He  has  saved  and  does  save  me."  "Give  up  the  world  and 
come  to  Jesus." 

I  was  unsettled,  my  future  quite  uncertain,  when  most  un- 
expectedly a  call  came  from  Toronto  again.  "The  Dean  is 
failing;  there  are  signs  of  brain  trouble.  You  have  built  up 
the  church  in  this  community.  We  look  to  you.  Come  to  us 
as  assistant  rector  of  St.  James's.  We  give  you  our  hands,  as 
you  know  you  have  our  hearts,  and  we  pledge  you  that  on  his 
death  you  shall  be  elected  our  rector." 

I  asked  my  wife  if  she  was  willing  to  go  to  Canada.  She 
said  "yes!"  and  we  went.  What  a  reception  we  had!  What 
kindness!  What  gladness!  And  enormous  crowds  waiting  to 
hear  me  at  the  church.  None  were  heartier  in  their  welcome 
than  the  sons  of  the  Dean;  and  from  the  bottom  of  my  heart  I 
appreciated  this  attitude  of  theirs;  for  here  was  a  young  stranger 
pushing  aside  one  whose  ministry  had  been,  for  forty  years, 
most  acceptable  to  his  flock,  and  who  was  their  loved  father. 


180  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

I  made  no  change  in  the  parish  at  first;  waited  to  feel  my  way, 
and  gave  myself  chiefly  to  the  preparations  of  my  sermons  and 
an  extended  visitation  of  the  large  membership  of  the  parish. 
While  Dean  Grassett  was  able  to  preach,  we  shared  the  pul- 
pit, but  his  appearances  grew  necessarily  less  frequent  month  by 
month.     After  the  first  six  months  he  scarcely  preached  at  all. 

And  now  I  must  tell,  as  briefly  as  I  can,  what  befell  me  dur- 
ing the  next  eighteen  months.  First  I  shall  tell  the  fact  and 
then  the  cause.  I  do  not  over-state  the  matter  when  I  say 
those  months  were  the  turning  point  in  my  life.  Turning  my 
back  on  professional  prosperity  in  England  had  been  hard. 
Leaving  St.  Giles'  and  Earlham  was  hard.  Going  against  my 
mother's  wishes  and  judgment,  and  feeling  that  as  life  closed  in 
for  her  I  was  more  and  more  estranged  from  her  by  my  own 
deliberate  choice  and  act,  was  bitterly  hard.  Now  I  was  to 
face  an  experience  harder  far  than  anything  I  had  yet  known. 
I  was  to  face  undeniable  failure  in  St.  James's,  Toronto.  Great 
crowds  had  met  me  on  my  arrival.  Sunday  evenings  thousands 
were  turned  from  the  doors.  But  soon  a  change  came  that  the 
casual  observer  could  not  ignore.  First  the  crowding  stopped. 
Then  empty  spaces  were  to  be  seen.  Then  the  old  members, 
the  stand-bys  of  the  church,  began  to  protest  and  sometimes 
to  go  to  other  churches. 

I  had  no  holiday  in  eighteen  months.  I  dared  not  absent  my- 
self. I  took  my  wife  and  our  first-born  to  Gloucester,  Massa- 
chusetts, left  them  there  and  returned  next  day.  My  vestry- 
men, men  I  loved  and  who  loved  me,  men  I  had  helped  to  a 
higher  religious  life  during  my  mission,  asked  for  an  appoint- 
ment; and  not  merely  as  friends,  but  as  officers  in  the  church, 
protested. 

"We  love  you,  we  trust  you,  but  what  are  you  doing?  You 
are  not  preaching  as  you  used  to  preach,  nor  what  you  used 
to  preach."  "You  are  pulling  down  what  you  so  lately  built 
up,  undoing  what  you  did.  You  are  confusing  us  all.  Your 
friends  can't  understand  you.  Give  us  the  old  gospel  you  gave 
us  with  such  power.  For  it  people  are  hungry  still."  And 
as  a  final  note,  rightfully  considering  the  responsibilities  of  their 
office,  they  added,  "The  collections  have  fallen  greatly." 

Shortly  after  this  terrible  visit,  the  Dean,  during  a  brief 
return  of  mental  vigour,  asked  me  to  come  into  his  study,  and 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     181 

as  our  interview  ended,  said  with  emphasis,  "Mr.  Rainsford, 
if  you  respect  yourself,  sir,  you  will  resign."  I  replied  with 
equal  emphasis  that  as  my  salary  came  from  the  vestry,  and  my 
call  to  the  assistant  rectorship  from  the  vestry,  till  the  vestry 
asked  me  to  resign  nothing  would  induce  me  to  do  so.  I  knew 
well  that  the  Dean  had  very  naturally  a  compact  following; 
good  men  many  of  them,  but  all  of  them  reactionary;  and  that 
these  men  had  persuaded  the  old  gentleman  to  act  as  he  did. 
The  question  before  me  was  whether  I  or  they  knew  best  what  my 
people  needed.  Well  I  knew  I  was  just  then  a  faltering  sort  of 
guide.  Yet,  uncertain  as  I  was  of  many  things,  I  knew  that  I 
was  not  seeking  my  own,  that  I  had  whole-heartedly  given  my- 
self in  this  matter  to  my  God,  and  so  my  duty  seemed  clear. 
I  had  a  responsibility  for  these  people.  Hungry,  they  had 
called  me  to  feed  them.  I  had  led  them  to  a  certain  point. 
Was  I  to  leave  them  now?  Was  the  gospel  I  had  brought  to 
them  so  poor  a  thing  as  that?  If  so,  then  indeed  I  had  been 
sadly  self-deceived.  Then  I  had  failed  utterly.  I  had  led  my 
flock  not  into  good  pasture  but  into  a  wilderness.  No,  for 
them  I  must  work  and  fight  and  pray;  and  once  again  my 
Master's  mighty  promise  came  to  me,  a  promise  I  had  many 
times  before  claimed  and  found  true.  "If  any  man  wills  to  do 
His  will  eivtic  8£Xj)  he  shall  know  of  the  doctrine."  (John  vn, 
17.)  But  to  preach  what  I  could  no  longer  believe  to  be  His 
truth  I  would  not,  or  to  get  out  of  my  difficulties  by  deserting 
my  post  I  could  not.  For  when  I  fought  for  my  own  Faith  I 
was  fighting  for  the  faith  of  my  people. 

Yet  in  those  days  mine  was  a  sorry  case.  I  was  like  a  man 
struggling  in  black,  stormy  waters  to  keep  his  own  lip  above 
the  salt  sea.     How  could  such  a  swimmer  save  others? 

Then  it  was  I  went  to  Phillips  Brooks,  as  I  have  elsewhere 
told,  and  though  he  did  not  attempt  to  answer  my  difficulties, 
his  kindly  confidence  cheered  me. 

There  are  few  who  can  realize  the  agony  of  this  gradual  fail- 
ure of  mine.  I  had  felt  the  intoxication  of  the  gathering  of 
thousands;  the  stimulus,  the  spiritual  elation,  and  the  joy,  one 
of  the  purest  joys  surely  given  to  man  to  feel,  the  joy  of  know- 
ing that  he  had  helped  many  to  higher  and  better  living.  These 
things  I  had  felt  and  seen;  this  joy  I  had  had  and  known — and 
now  all  was  changed.     The  very  people  I  had  helped  cried  to  me 


182  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

not  to  fail  them.  "  Did  you  not  believe  what  you  preached  to 
us?"  they  cried.  "If  you  did,  oh,  preach  it  again  to  us  now." 
So  the  church  congregations  shrank.  Collections  melted  away. 
Friends  looked  doubtful  and  enemies  jeered. 

The  greatest  man  that  ever  fought  his  way  through  darkness 
was  Jesus.  Next  to  him  I  think  stands  Paul.  The  story  of  his 
shipwreck  and  of  his  rallying  the  defeated  crew  is  one  of  the 
greatest  stories  ever  written.  "Driven  up  and  down  in  Adria, 
neither  sun  nor  stars  for  many  days  appearing,"  all  lesser  men 
abandoned  hope.  Before  the  despairing  crowd  stands  forth 
the  little  shackled  Jew.  Hear  him!  "There  stood  by  me 
this  night  the  angel  of  God,  whose  I  am  and  whom  I  serve,  say- 
ing, 'Fear  not,  Paul.' "  And  I,  too,  after  being  driven  up  and 
down  in  my  own  Adria,  and  coming  near  as  a  man  could  to 
shipwreck,  had  my  own  angel  visitor,  who  brought  me  strength 
to  help  in  my  time  of  need. 

It  happened  in  this  wise.  I  had  determined  to  spend  a  whole 
night  in  prayer.  Several  times  I  had  done  this  before,  and  had 
not  gained  any  help  so  far  as  I  knew  by  it.  But  I  would  try  it 
once  more.  So  I  prayed  and  prayed  till  I  must  have  fallen 
asleep,  kneeling  by  my  bed.  It  was  not  far  from  morning, 
and  I  was  in  a  semi-conscious  state,  when  through  my  mind 
drifted  the  parable  of  the  Prodigal  Son.  "When  he  came  to 
himself,"  it  ran,  "To  himself,  to  his  true  self,"  he  said,  "I  will 
arise  and  go  to  my  Father."  Was  it  possible?  How  had  I 
missed  it?  In  the  farthest  of  far  countries  he  was  still  his 
father's  son.  In  all  the  wild  riot  of  youth  he  was  still  his  father's 
son.  Just  as  much  his  son  as  when  he  sat  at  his  table  at  home. 
Fallen  into  the  gutter  and  joined  to  the  foreigner,  he  was  his 
father's  son.  Everlastingly  and  indissolubly  his  son,  not  be- 
cause he  was  converted,  not  because  he  turned  homeward,  but 
because  he  was  a  man-child,  begotten  of  his  father.  Alive  be- 
cause within  him  beat  his  father's  life.  "Neither  life  nor 
death  nor  things  present  or  to  come  "  could  ever  make  him  any- 
thing else.  I  had  my  answer.  I  got  up  from  my  knees,  got 
into  bed,  and  slept  till  late  next  morning. 

The  message  I  got  that  night  is  the  foundation  of  what  I  have 
taught  ever  since.  It  altered  my  whole  ministry.  It  seems  to 
me  a  greater,  more  far-reaching,  more  inclusive  message  every 
year  I  live  and  every  time  I  try  to  preach  it.     An  inexhausti- 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     183 

ble  gospel.     The  wayfaring  man  can  understand  it,  and  yet  the 
wisest  philosopher  cannot  exhaust  it. 

Next  Sunday  morning  I  preached  from  the  text,  "He  came  to 
himself,"  and  I  spoke  to  my  people  with  an  assurance  and  a 
power  I  had  not  known  for  many  a  long  day.  Two  years  be- 
fore, at  the  close  of  my  mission,  I  had  had  the  same  text,  but 
this  was  a  different  sermon. 

The  three  stories  (Luke  xv)  all  told  the  same  emancipating 
gospel:  The  lost  sheep  belonged  to  the  shepherd;  the  lost  silver 
was  owned  by  the  woman;  the  wandering  boy  was  his  father's 
son.  And  all  three  of  them  were  out  of  place  till  they  were  at 
home.  No  religious  experience  conceivable  can  make  me  a 
son  of  God.  I  am  that  already.  That  is  the  everlasting 
gospel  proclaimed  by  Jesus.  All  Life  was  to  me,  that  Sunday 
morning,  God's  vast  cathedral,  and  the  holiest  thing,  the 
divinest  within  it,  was  Man.  I  felt  I  had  a  new  message  from 
God  to  men,  and  the  people  felt  it,  and  that  Sunday  morning 
was  the  turning  of  the  tide. 

Marcus  Aurelius  tells  a  story  of  his  pilot,  who  had  for  many 
years,  and  in  many  seas,  held  the  tiller  of  his  galley.  It  was  a 
stormy  night  and  the  Emperor  came  on  deck  to  hearten  his 
crew,  for  the  danger  was  extreme.  The  old  steersman,  lashed 
to  his  tiller,  was  making  a  prayer  to  Neptune  and  the  Emperor 
overheard  him.  "Father  Neptune,"  he  said,  "you  may  sink 
me  if  you  will,  you  may  save  me  if  you  will,  but  whether  you 
sink  me  or  save  me,  I  will  hold  my  tiller  true."  To  hold  my 
tiller  true  I  had  tried  hard,  and  God  had  given  me  grace  to  do  it. 
That  was  the  reason  I  came  through  my  storm,  yes,  and  carried 
my  people  with  me.  I  had  won  a  new  sense  of  my  own  sonship 
to  God.  That  sonship  did  not  depend  on  any  religious  ex- 
perience whatever;  not  because  I  repented  of  my  sins  and  was 
converted  was  I  God's  son,  but  because  I  was  free-born.  And 
seeing  this  great  truth  and  feeling  its  power,  others  felt  it,  too, 
and  all  the  church's  life  and  work  took  new  vigour. 

My  readers  who  have  followed  me  understandingly  can 
readily  see  why  I  lost  for  the  time  being  my  grip  on  the  com- 
munity in  Toronto.  I  had  won  them  by  infusing  new  reality 
into  the  religious  forms  of  thought  to  which  from  childhood 
they  had  been  accustomed.  I  could  no  longer  state  these 
well-known  doctrines  in  the  terms  they  knew,  and  I  had  as  yet 


184  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

nothing  definite  enough  to  take  their  place.  And  so,  naturally, 
it  seemed  to  my  people  that  I  was  pulling  down  all  I  had  builded 
up.  I  look  back  myself  on  those  days  of  darkness  with  won- 
der. I  do  not  understand  how  I  accomplished  what  I  did.  I 
was  so  utterly  lonely,  and  all  circumstances  seemed  against  me. 
George  Grassett  was  perhaps  the  only  man  I  knew  who  under- 
stood something  of  what  I  was  going  through. 

I  do  not  boast  when  I  say  that  I  am  astonished  that  I  won 
through  as  I  did.  I  am  sensible  that  I  have  not  always  walked 
so  steadily  the  high,  hard  path,  as  I  walked  it  during  those  dark 
months.  Biographers  seem  to  take  it  for  granted  that  men 
whose  lives  prove  them  good  men,  always  without  faltering 
do  walk  the  high,  lonely  path.  Bible  biographers  are  much  too 
true  to  nature  to  support  this  modern  theory.  My  youth  was 
in  my  favour.  There  is  a  spiritual  resilience  in  one  before  forty 
that  is  not  always  there  after  forty.  That  is  what  my  friend, 
Professor  Osier  (who,  by  the  way,  was  a  Torontonian)  meant, 
I  take  it,  when  jokingly  he  suggested  euthanasia  for  older  men. 
When  we  are  young  we  are  more  one-sided  than  we  are  later. 
We  have  not  yet  learned  to  recognize  the  many-sidedness  of  the 
questions  confronting  us  in  life.  Decisions  are  more  quickly 
made.  Then  we  have  time,  when  we  are  younger,  to  correct 
our  mistakes  and  sins.  Like  the  wound  a  gardener  makes  in 
grafting  a  young  tree,  the  growing  power  of  the  tree  hides  the 
scar  your  grafting  knife  has  made,  and  the  tree's  native  vigour 
finds  newer  and  richer  vent.  "I  write  to  you,  young  men, 
because  ye  are  strong  and  have  overcome  the  wicked  one,"  so 
writes  Paul. 

My  heart  leaps  up  when  I  behold  a  rainbow  in  the  sky; 
So  was  it  when  my  days  began.     So  is  it  now  I  am  a  man; 
So  be  it  when  I  shall  grow  old,  or  let  me  die. 

And  Wordsworth  agrees  with  Paul. 

In  describing  these  dark  days  and  the  effect  my  difficulties 
had  on  my  people,  I  do  not  wish  to  be  understood  as  saying 
that  the  bulk  of  the  congregation  realized  what  was  the  matter. 
Most  of  them  thought  that  "the  young  rector  did  not  preach 
as  well  as  he  used  to  preach;  perhaps  the  vestry  had  been  rather 
hasty  in  its  call  to  him."  And  there  with  them  the  matter 
ended.     I  took  good  care  that  so  far  as  I  was  concerned  they 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     185 

should  have  no  inkling  of  what  trouble  I  was  in.  I  want  to 
state  my  experiences  in  these  days  so  that  they  may  be  perhaps 
of  service  to  others  who  find  themselves  confronted  with  cir- 
cumstances similar  to  mine.  In  the  first  place,  I  spoke  to  no 
one;  confessed  to  no  one  but  my  friend  George  Grassett  and 
Phillips  Brooks.  "You  must  fight  it  out  by  yourself,"  Phillips 
Brooks  had  said,  and  he  was  right. 

Had  I  not  preserved  strict  silence,  my  state  of  mind  could  not 
fail  soon  to  have  become  town  gossip,  and  then  the  sooner  I 
resigned  the  better  for  the  community.  Next  1  watched  my 
words  and  tried  to  avoid  a  negative  dealing  with  great  subjects 
and  doctrines.  I  attacked  none;  I  took  back  no  statements  I 
had  made;  but  at  the  same  time  tried  to  cast  the  old  doctrines  in 
new  forms  when  I  preached.  Never  under  any  circumstances, 
however,  did  I  say  anything  that  I  did  not  believe  was  true. 
Here,  naturally,  I  was  continually  blundering  and  fumbling,  and 
my  uncertainty  became  evident  to  any  who  had  moderate 
powers  of  observation.  When  I  came  among  them  all  at  first, 
I  came  as  a  man  using  a  well-known,  well-sharpened  instru- 
ment, well  adapted  to  its  purpose.  This  I  had  discarded, 
though  I  did  not  say  so,  and  was  laying  about  me  now  with 
a  weapon  of  my  own  manufacture,  which,  moreover,  I  did  not 
use  as  efficiently  as  I  had  the  first  one. 

I  do  not  wish  to  dwell  too  long  on  those  first  eighteen  months 
of  ministry  as  assistant  rector  of  St.  James's,  but  not  in  the 
years  before  them,  nor  yet  in  those  that  were  to  come  after, 
were  there  any  experiences  so  vital  to  me.  Under  God  they 
made  me.  There  is  an  old  Puritan  saying  about  feeling  "the 
burden  of  souls"  that  may  have  gathered  to  it  in  our  day  a 
suggestion  of  unreality.  There  was  no  unreality  attaching 
to  it  when  applied  to  me  and  my  people  then.  I  stood  to 
many  of  them  as  a  father  in  God.  I  had  brought  them  the 
very  bread  of  life.  They  and  I  together  had  renewed  our  vows 
of  faithfulness  to  Jesus,  and  that  any  changes  in  my  own  views 
of  Jesus  and  His  teachings  should  result  in  these  sheep  of  my 
flock  growing  doubtful  of  the  Great  Shepherd,  to  whom  I 
had  led  them  but  a  short  time  ago,  was  positively  intolerable  to 
me.  And  yet,  suffer  as  I  might — and  I  did  suffer  in  those  dark, 
lonely  days — of  one  thing  I  was  sure,  one  duty  I  saw  clearly;  it 
was  this:    If  I,  a  poor,  sinful,  ignorant  man,  was  to  be  true  to 


1 86  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

myself,  to  my  people,  and  to  my  God,  I  dare  not  temporize 
about  speaking  the  truth.  The  darker  the  night,  the  heavier 
the  storm,  the  greater  the  reason  to  hold  my  tiller  true. 

Emerson  says:  "God  offers  every  man  the  choice  between 
Truth  and  Repose.  Take  which  you  please;  you  cannot  have 
both."  When  I  came  back  from  England  to  my  dear  people  in 
Toronto,  that  was  just  the  choice  offered  to  me,  though  I  did  not 
realize  it  then.  I  had  a  delightful  home,  among  more  than 
merely  appreciative  friends;  in  a  community  that  was  then  the 
second,  and  seemed  destined  to  become  in  the  near  future  the 
first,  in  influence  in  a  new  and  great  country — I  was  young,  and 
the  world  was  before  me,  but  search  it  all  over  and  I  could  not 
have  found  a  field  that  offered  greater  return  for  work  done,  for 
St.  James's  Cathedral  was  by  long  odds  the  most  influential 
church  in  the  Dominion.  I  was  assured  of  its  rectorship. 
What  more  pleasant  surroundings  than  these  could  any  young 
man  want?  No!  It  had  not  been  easy  to  keep  my  tiller  true, 
but  thank  God  I  had  done  it. 

And  now  for  me  the  winter  was  over  and  gone,  and  I  preached 
and  worked  as  I  had  never  done  in  my  life  before.  I  found,  too, 
I  had  a  healthier  outlook  on  things.  I  came  to  the  conclusion 
that  a  holiday  now  and  then  was  good  for  me.  In  fact,  I  grew 
in  a  healthy  way  quite  worldly.  I  played  tennis,  and  skated, 
and  fished,  and  shot.  If  I  had  laid  aside  a  well-worn  coat,  I 
had  done  so  only  because  the  sunshine  I  stood  in  made  it  no 
longer  necessary.  I  began  to  feel  a  new  courage,  to  cease  to 
dread  anything,  even  my  own  doubts.  Plenty  of  fighting 
there  surely  lay  ahead  still,  but  new  allies  I  had,  new  aid  had 
come  to  me  just  as  I  was  beginning  to  lose  heart  at  the  odds  to 
which  I  was  opposed.  Let  the  dear  childish  fables  go,  if  they 
must.    Life  itself  was  good — all  Life,  for  it  was  full  of  God. 

It  is  hard  to  put  the  change,  the  enlargement  I  felt,  into  words. 
Out  of  long-continued  turmoil  had  come  my  body,  far  from 
perfect  maybe,  but  good  enough  to  work  with.  Out  of  spiritual 
turmoil  had  come  my  mind  and  soul,  also  far  from  perfect,  but 
capable  of  receiving  the  abundant  life  that  now  filled  the  whole 
of  me.  If  I  must  slough  off  precious  old  things,  I  should  do  so 
only  because  new  life,  fuller  life,  was  pushing  them  off,  as  the 
young  leaf  that  comes  in  springtime  pushes  off  the  old  one. 
The  frost  and  storms  of  winter  could  not  tear  the  old  away, 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     187 

but  the  pushing  of  the  new  life  that  has  come  to  bloom  in  its 
place  is  irresistible. 

Tis  life  whereof  our  veins  are  scant, 
T\s  life,  not  death,  for  which  we  pant, 
More  life  and  fuller  that  we  want. 

How  I  had  wanted  it !  Now  it  had  come,  more  life  and  richer. 
For  I  had  more  of  God,  more  of  a  greater  God,  a  God  for  whom 
I  needed  not  to  apologize. 

I  noticed  now  that  certain  people  began  to  appear  at  the 
Cathedral  services  who  had  been  noticeably  absent  from  them 
during  the  mission,  and  also  during  the  crowded  times  im- 
mediately following  it.  Among  these  was  Goldwin  Smith.  He 
was  unpopular  just  then,  for  he  was  supposed  to  advocate  the 
absorption  of  Canada  by  the  United  States.  He  published  a 
little  weekly  leaflet  called  the  Bystander,  extraordinarily  well- 
written — none  had  a  better  style  than  he — and  of  course  very 
clever.  I  think  Goldwin  Smith  was  one  of  the  very  ablest  men 
intellectually  I  ever  met.  His  fund  of  information  was  ex- 
traordinary, but  he  lacked  the  gift  of  making  his  guests  talk, 
and  so  at  his  table,  though  there  was  an  excellent  cook  at  the 
Grange,  dinners  did  not  always  seem  to  "go,"  and  conversation 
was  apt  to  be  a  monologue.  He  had  little  sympathy  with  the 
extreme  evangelicism  of  my  first  days'  work,  but  as  he  saw  I 
was  groping  my  way  toward  evolutionism  he  took  a  kindly 
interest  in  me,  asking  me  to  dinner,  etc.  He  was  not  an  easy 
man  to  talk  to  then;  others  felt  this  as  I  did.  He  was  very 
much  alone  in  the  town  and  had  no  intimates.  When  I  left 
Toronto,  I  received  several  letters  from  Goldwin  Smith,  and 
later  I  found  his  company  altogether  delightful,  and  visited 
him  more  than  once.  He  was  brilliant  as  ever,  but  he  seemed 
to  have  won  a  more  understanding,  sympathetic  outlook  on  life 
than  he  had  when  he  first  so  kindly  sought  my  acquaintance. 
He  was  thought  to  be  a  cold  man,  but  I  am  sure  he  desired, 
before  all  things,  to  serve  his  day  and  generation. 

Here  is  the  last  letter  Goldwin  Smith  wrote  me.  It  has  not 
heretofore  been  published.  I  wish  I  had  kept  the  others  I 
received  from  him.  In  it  appears  the  clear  vision  and  unmov- 
able  courage  of  the  fine  critic  of  life  that  he  was.  How  right  he 
was  in  his  adverse  judgment  of  England's  action  in  the  Boer 


i88  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

War!  Few  of  us  saw  things  as  he  did  then,  and  his  confession 
of  his  sense  of  the  need  of  Christian  communion  is  a  fitting  and 
beautiful  conclusion  to  a  great  critical  and  scholarly  career. 

The  Grange,  Toronto, 

Jan.  7,  1904. 
My  dear  Dr.  Rainsford, — 

I  am  very  glad  to  find  that  you  approve  my  letter  to  the  Sun.  No  harm, 
I  hope  possibly  some  good,  may  be  done  to  liberal  clergymen  like  yourself 
who  are  trying  to  set  Christianity  free  from  its  dogmatic  shackles  by  lay  dis- 
cussion of  these  questions,  with  which  you  can  hardly  deal  unrestrainedly 
yourselves  without  provoking  angry  opposition  and  imperilling  your  useful- 
ness. Irreverent  treatment,  such  as  that  of  Ingersol,  or  even  that  of  Haeckel, 
who  sneers  at  the  Christian  God  as  a  "Gaseous  Vertebrate,"  must  of  course 
do  harm  to  you  and  all  of  us.  Anything  like  irreverence  I  do  my  best  to 
avoid,  not  that  to  avoid  it  costs  me  any  effort. 

Though  I  am  no  longer  able  to  profess  belief  in  the  creeds,  I  have  not  broken 
away  from  the  spiritual  life  embodied  in  the  Christian  Communion.  I  at- 
tend a  little  Baptist  church.  The  Baptists  remained  comparatively  true  to 
what  I  regarded  as  the  principles  of  Christianity  during  the  Boer  War, 
while  passion  raged  around,  and  the  Anglican  Synod  at  this  place  wound  up 
with  three  cheers  for  Lord  Roberts.  The  Methodists  were  fully  as  bad  as  the 
Anglicans,  or,  considering  their  professions,  worse.  The  original  enthusiasm 
of  that  sect  is  in  great  measure  exhausted,  and  its  place  is  being  taken  by 
other  things. 

I  cannot  look  forward  to  the  pleasure  of  seeing  you  at  Lakewood  again. 
L.  is  changed.  It  is  no  longer  the  quiet  place  which  attracted  us  old  people. 
But  indeed  I  shall  hardly  leave  home  again.  I  wish  there  were  a  chance  of 
seeing  you  here.  (Come  of  the  creeds  what  will,  you  are  keeping  the  religion 
of  Jesus  alive  in  New  York.) 

Ever  most  truly  yours, 

Gold  win  Smith. 

Whenever  he  happened  to  be  in  Toronto  over  Sunday,  Sir 
John  Macdonald  always  came  to  the  Cathedral.  His  great 
opponent,  the  Honourable  Edward  Blake,  was  a  member  of  the 
vestry,  and  many  times  was  I  indebted  to  him  for  wise  advice. 
Political  feeling  then  ran  high.  Sir  John  was  compacting  the 
great  Dominion.  He  was  looking  toward  nationhood  for 
Canada,  but  his  "national  policy"  raised  a  storm.  The  event, 
I  think  it  cannot  be  denied,  proved  Sir  John  right.  When  first 
I  visited  Canada  in  1869,  the  United  States  was  steadily  draw- 
ing to  itself  Canadian  manhood.  Even  so  late  as  '78  and  '79, 
many  of  the  brightest  young  men  in  my  large  men's  Bible  class 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     189 

were  drifting  annually  over  the  border.  But  before  I  left 
St.  James's,  the  tide  had  turned,  and  the  population  of  the 
country,  which,  in  spite  of  a  considerable  immigration  and  a 
large  birth  rate,  had  remained  almost  at  a  standstill,  began  first 
a  slow  and  then  a  rapid  advance. 

Canadian  politics  were  in  my  time,  and  I  fear  there  can  be 
no  doubt  about  it  still  are,  quite  unusually  corrupt.  (If  I 
hurt  some  old  friends'  feelings  as  I  write  this  I  cannot  help  it.) 
We  on  our  side  have  still  much  to  be  ashamed  of  in  that  line, 
but  I  have  not  found  in  any  locality,  or  in  any  party  in  the 
United  States,  corruption  so  universal  and  unashamed  as  I 
found  in  Canada. 

Sir  John  Macdonald  was  an  extraordinarily  able  man,  a  first- 
class  debater.  As  a  politician  he  was  patriotic  to  the  core. 
Personally  he  was  incapable  of  touching  a  dirty  penny.  His 
strength,  his  brain,  his  life,  he  laid  on  the  altar  of  his  country. 
He  lived  simply  and  he  died  poor.  He  had  an  extraordinary 
command  over  himself.  Before  I  knew  him  he  had  been  a 
very  heavy  drinker.  Perhaps  it  would  be  more  accurate  to 
say  consumer  of  alcohol,  for  I  was  told  no  one  ever  knew  him  to 
be  drunk.  But  he  seemed  to  me  to  have  quite  conquered  any 
craving  for  liquor  that  he  had  had.  He  had  accustomed  him- 
self to  do  with  little  sleep.  When  Mrs.  Rainsford  and  I  stayed 
with  Sir  John  and  Lady  Macdonald  at  Ottawa,  he  would  keep 
me  talking  in  his  study  till  after  two  o'clock  in  the  morning,  and 
in  the  morning  he  was  up  earlier  than  the  household,  brisk, 
clearheaded,  pleasantly  witty,  facing  immense  work,  and  armed 
at  all  points  to  meet  the  very  able  opponents  arrayed  against 
him  in  daily  conflicts  on  which  depended  the  fate  of  his  govern- 
ment. 

He  was,  I  believe,  extraordinarily  gifted  in  the  management 
of  men.  Hence  his  continued  success.  I  was  told  he  was  un- 
scrupulous in  the  means  he  employed  to  win  his  way.  I  can 
well  believe  it.  But  if  he  was,  it  was  for  the  land  and  the  people 
he  believed  in  and  loved;  never  for  himself.  I  think  Sir  John 
was  a  very  great  man.  He  was  an  omnivorous  reader;  he  read 
not  as  fast  as  Theodore  Roosevelt,  but  still  very  fast  indeed, 
and  what  he  read  he  remembered.  The  stories  of  his  ready 
wit  are  innumerable.  I  must  give  only  two.  An  opponent 
on  the  floor  of  the  House  of  Commons  at  Ottawa  accused  him 


190  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

of  having  stolen  part  of  the  political  programme  of  the  op- 
position. Said  he:  "Sir  John  has  stolen  the  brains  of  the  op- 
position." Quick  as  a  flash  Sir  John  was  on  his  feet,  appealing 
to  the  Chair  on  a  point  of  order.  "Mr.  Speaker,  the  Honourable 
Member  has  accused  me  of  petty  larceny."  Sir  John's  op- 
ponents were  called  "the  Grits,"  a  popular  name  for  the  then 
Liberal  party.  Sir  John  had  a  severe  operation  for  appendi- 
citis. The  causes  of  that  disorder  were  not  so  well  known  as 
they  are  now.  Sir  Charles  Tupper  was  an  intimate  friend  and 
a  member  of  his  Cabinet.  For  days  Sir  John  hung  on  the 
border  land.  When  the  tide  slowly  turned,  Sir  Charles  was 
by  the  bedside,  and  Sir  John,  seeing  him,  whispered:  "What 
did  they  find,  Tupper?"  "A  small  piece  of  grit."  "Those 
damned  Grits!     I  knew  they  would  be  the  death  of  me." 

Of  course  my  opinion,  a  young  outsider  then,  on  the  rights 
and  wrongs  of  the  doings  of  both  Conservatives  and  Grits  is 
of  little  worth,  but  I  met  men  on  whose  actions  great  things 
hinged,  and  who  knew  what  was  going  on.  Some  of  the  best 
informed  of  them  gave  me  their  confidence,  and  as  a  result  I 
became  sure  that  when  the  Canadian  Pacific  Railroad  had  to 
be  put  through,  it  was  for  more  than  one  man  in  that  deal  a 
question  whether  he  went  to  prison  or  to  the  House  of  Lords. 
To-day  the  corruption  tacitly  permitted  in  Canada  where  great 
railroads  are  concerned  is  as  bad,  I  fear,  as  it  was  then.  I  can- 
not understand  why  the  Christian  conscience  of  the  land  toler- 
ates it.  One  reason  is  that  the  religious  people  are  still  fighting 
over  old,  worn-out  issues — "the  mint,  annis  and  commin  of  the 
Law" — while  there  is  a  stinking  Augean  stable  there  that  is 
breeding  a  national  fever.  Their  house-cleaning,  when  it 
comes,  may  be  costly. 

My  wife  and  I  can  never  forget  Sir  John's  and  Lady  Mac- 
donald's  kindness  to  us  when  we  stayed  with  them  at  Ottawa. 
The  visit  was  to  have  been  brief,  but  Mrs.  Rainsford  was  taken 
ill,  and  as  she  expected  soon  to  be  a  mother,  the  doctors  did 
not  approve  of  an  immediate  return  to  Toronto.  The  new 
national  policy  was  then  in  debate  and  excitement  ran  high. 
Yet  for  hours  at  a  time  Sir  John  would  sit  by  a  young  wife's 
bedside,  read  to  her,  gossip  to  her,  and  be  the  altogether  charm- 
ing, fatherly  man  that  at  heart  he  was. 

Yes,  Sir  John  Macdonald  was  a  many-sided  and  very  great 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     191 

man.  He  was  a  man  of  vision;  he  had  knowledge  of  the  times; 
he  saw  what  his  country  needed.  And  using  the  instruments 
he  found  ready  to  hand,  the  only  ones  available,  early  and  late 
he  bent  every  energy  that  was  in  him  to  the  accomplishment 
of  his  task.  He  has  been  compared  frequently  to  Disraeli.  In 
features  and  build  there  was  a  resemblance  between  them,  but 
Macdonald's  work  was  sound,  far-seeing,  and  has  finally  stood 
the  test  of  time.  Disraeli,  Lord  Salisbury  sadly  confessed  in 
later  years,  in  his  day  of  power  "backed  the  wrong  horse." 

He  was  a  very  clever,  but  surely  not  a  very  great  man.  He 
appealed  to  all  that  was  weakest  and  worst  in  the  nation  that, 
for  a  time,  his  brilliance  dazzled.  He  was  like  his  novels: 
they  are  clever,  but  certainly  not  first-class. 

My  last  two  years  at  St.  James's  were  very  happy  years. 
I  had  of  course  a  good  deal  of  opposition  from  conscientious 
objectors  to  what  I  was  teaching  and  preaching.  To  the  old 
Evangelicals  in  the  church  and  town  I  smelt  of  heresy.  I  was 
eminently  unsound  on  such  vital  matters  as  the  "Atonement," 
"Verbal  Inspiration  of  the  Scriptures,"  and  "Eternal  Punish- 
ment." They  had  another  grievance,  too.  The  bitterest  sort 
of  feeling  then  existed  between  Low  Church  and  High  Church, 
and  I  evidently  could  not  be  depended  on  to  take  an  active  part 
in  this  civil  war. 

Still,  these  were  but  trifling  matters.  The  old  church  was 
once  more  packed  with  congregations,  largely  composed  of 
young  people.  I  had  a  splendid  Bible  class.  My  people  were 
with  me,  heart  and  soul,  and  the  collections  were  no  longer  a 
matter  of  concern  to  my  worthy  vestry.  The  only  drawback 
to  our  happiness  was  my  wife's  health,  which  still  was  poor. 

I  read  in  the  mornings,  shutting  my  study  door  resolutely, 
trying  to  make  up  for  the  lack  of  sound  reading  which  my 
missionary  life  had  made  impossible.  I  discovered  Fiske,  and 
he  was  a  discovery.  I  rediscovered  Mazzini.  I  cannot  over- 
state what  I  owe  to  Mazzini.  He  has  to  my  mind  a  truer, 
saner  hold  on  the  real  scope  and  meaning  of  the  religion  of 
Jesus  as  it  should  be  applied  to  modern  life  than  any  great 
teacher,  any  great  public  figure  of  his  time.  His  faith  was 
profound,  not  in  God  only,  but  in  man.  He  was  at  once  a 
radical  of  radicals,  a  conspirator,  working  at  constant  peril  of 
his  life,  for  the  union  of  his  beloved  Italy,  and  a  preacher  of  the 


192  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

oldest  and  purest  of  all  gospels — that  life  was  a  glorious  op- 
portunity, to  be  resolutely  spent  in  making  the  world  better, 
and  all  men  in  it  worthier  of  their  high  calling  in  Jesus,  man's 
Leader  and  Lord. 

All  sorts  of  men,  wise  and  foolish,  learned  and  simple,  offered 
to  the  Nineteenth  Century  their  theories  of  social  reform. 
Mazzini  was  the  greatest  figure  of  them  all.  Steadily,  with  an 
inflexible  courage  in  which  there  was  no  taint  of  egoism,  he 
trod  his  high  and  lonely  way,  his  enemies  many  and  powerful, 
his  friends  often  few,  and  they  but  partially  understanding  him. 
Ceaselessly  he  strove  for  the  Christianizing  of  politics.  Re- 
ligion as  he  saw  and  practised  it  was  nowhere  more  necessary 
than  in  so-called  secular  affairs;  for  Christianity  was  no  in- 
dividual matter;  it  was  the  very  soul  of  public  duty.  For 
man's  relations  to  his  fellow-man  could  never  be  just,  peaceful, 
and  harmonious  till  in  business  and  politics  he  based  his  actions 
on  its  law  of  loving,  believing,  selfless  service. 

I  had  no  teacher  to  go  to  in  those  formative  days.  If  I  had 
been  able  to  sit  under  the  Cairds  in  Scotland,  Sabatier  in  Paris, 
or  attend  the  lectures  of  our  own  great  Royce  at  Harvard,  I 
would  have  had  the  meat  and  drink  I  needed.  They  were  not 
for  me  then.  But  my  debt  to  Mazzini  I  can  never  exaggerate. 
The  soundest  leaders  of  reform  have  been  inspired  by  this  great, 
lonely  Christian  thinker  and  hero,  who  died  in  exile,  denounced 
and  misunderstood.  His  was  the  inevitable  fate  of  men  who 
are,  like  their  master,  far  ahead  of  their  time. 

The  Dean's  failing  health  now  cast  the  responsibility  of  the 
parish  on  me,  and  I  had  been  unsuccessful  in  supplying  myself 
with  any  really  efficient  clerical  aid.  Young  clerics  could  be 
had,  but  they  were  not  the  sort  of  men  I  wanted,  nor  could  such 
men  be  readily  found.  My  discovery  of  this  fact  gave  me  quite 
a  new  idea  of  one  of  the  chief  functions  of  a  great  parish,  which 
later  I  was  to  embody  in  St.  George's,  New  York:  It  should  be 
a  training  school  for  the  younger  clergy,  supplementing  the 
wholly  inadequate  training  which  the  various  divinity  schools 
gave. 

In  this  Canada  was  then  woefully  behindhand;  the  Episcopal 
Church  was  losing  ground,  but  it  was  a  hard  matter  to  make  the 
bishops  face  the  facts.  I  will  quote  an  instance.  I  had  been 
staying  at  Ottawa  with  Sir  John,  when  an  invitation  came  to 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     193 

me  to  address  a  great  gathering  of  bishops  and  clergy  at  Mon- 
treal. An  appeal  was  to  be  made  for  the  extension  of  home 
missionary  work.  Sir  John  had  told  me  of  some  census  figures, 
lately  tabulated  by  the  Government.  These  had  been  before 
the  public  for  some  time,  but  had  not  gained  any  special  notice. 
They  proved  that  the  English  Church  in  Canada  had  for  many 
years  steadily  been  losing  ground.1  With  her  was  from  the 
first  all  the  influence  of  the  Church  in  the  old  land.  She  had 
a  propitious  start,  was  helped  in  many  ways  from  overseas, 
and  was  very  substantially  endowed  with  Government  gifts 
of  land.  In  spite  of  these  unusual  advantages  over  the  "  sects," 
she  had  steadily  lost  ground  to  them.  First  the  Roman 
Catholics  passed  her;  then  the  Methodists;  then  the  Presby- 
terians, and  now  the  Baptists.  She  did  not  fit  herself,  she  never 
has  fitted  herself,  to  Colonial  conditions.  She  has  not  done  in 
Australia  as  well  as  have  other  branches  of  the  Christian  bod- 
ies, who  have  not  enjoyed  the  initial  advantages  that  were  hers. 

This  was  no  news  to  me,  but  I  determined  to  make  it  the  base 
of  my  appeal  at  the  meeting.  I  would  say,  let  us  all,  irre- 
spective of  party,  face  an  alarming  and  shameful  state  of 
things,  admit  before  God  and  men  that  there  has  been  and  is 
something  radically  mistaken  in  our  methods,  if  not  in  our 
message,  and  seek  whole-heartedly  better  to  understand  and 
come  in  touch  with  the  people,  rich  and  poor,  of  this  great 
Dominion.  Standing  with  the  newly  published  census  volumes 
in  my  hand,  I  did  this.  What  response  was  there  made  ?  The 
Bishop  of  Montreal,  who  had  called  the  meeting  and  was  in  the 
Chair,  making  no  attempt  whatever  to  answer  what  I  said, 
ignoring  the  fact  that  as  I  spoke  I  gave  chapter  and  verse  for 
each  statement  I  made,  swept  the  whole  matter  aside,  declaring 
that  I  was  a  newcomer  to  the  country,  and  that  all  old  residents 
like  himself  knew  such  statements  were  absurd.  His  remarks 
drew  applause.  After  that  the  proceedings  were  of  the  usual 
monotonous  kind  so  commonly  characteristic  of  missionary 
gatherings. 

Here  again  I  digress,  tempted  by  a  reminiscence  of  Phillips 
Brooks.  After  his  funeral,  which  I  attended,  I  was  asked 
to  make  a  "talk"  at  our  Divinity  School  at  Harvard  on  my 
friend.    I  did  so.     It  was  not  a  lecture,  just  a  talk.     Doctor 

XI  think  in  late  years  the  Church  of  England  in  Canada  has  been  gaining. 


i94  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Allen,  who  had  already  set  to  work  on  his  Life  of  Phillips 
Brooks,  and  whom  I  admired  as  did  all  who  knew  him,  heard 
of  this  talk  of  mine  and  asked  me  to  write  down  what  I  had 
said,  as  he  wanted  to  incorporate  it  in  the  "Life."  I  did  so, 
and  in  due  time  received  a  kind  note  from  Doctor  Allen,  saying 
he  was  sorry  that  he  could  not  print  what  I  had  sent  him,  as  it 
did  not  fit  in  with  what  he  had  written.  When  you  hear  my 
story  you  may  agree  with  Doctor  Allen,  but  I  think  it  a  very 
human  story. 

Phillips  Brooks  had  written  me,  asking  me  to  preach  for  him, 
saying  he  wanted  a  Sunday  off,  as  he  was  tired.  He  was,  at  this 
time,  visibly  beginning  to  fail  in  health. 

Phillips  Brooks :  "  Rainsford,  there  is  a  big  missionary  meet- 
ing in  the  church  to-night,  and  we  must  go  to  it.  It  is  too  bad; 
they  will  kill  it.  They  are  giving  us  three  missionary  bishops. 
One  is  too  much.     Three  will  kill  it  dead." 

I  expressed  a  certain  hopefulness  that  I  didn't  feel,  and  we 
went  together.  Up  the  aisle  I  followed  him.  Of  course  we 
wore  no  robes,  for  the  missionary  authorities  had  the  church 
that  evening  to  themselves,  and  we  were  of  the  audience  only. 

Phillips  Brooks  and  I  sat  in  one  of  the  front  pews.  The 
first  missionary  bishop  made  a  long  talk  and  said  little.  Phil- 
lips Brooks  was  restless.  At  the  best,  he  was  a  poor  listener, 
his  great  eyes  always  roving  round  and  round. 

The  second  missionary  bishop  followed  and  said  no  more 
than  the  first.  When  the  third  poor  man  got  up,  Phillips 
Brooks's  great  body  showed  what  he  felt,  and  I,  who  had  often 
been  scared  almost  out  of  my  senses  by  Phillips  Brooks  in  front 
of  me,  felt  heartily  sorry  for,  and  in  sympathy  with,  this  third 
successor  of  the  Apostles.  When  at  last  the  last  hymn  was 
sung  and  the  blessing  given,  Phillips  Brooks  rose  and  at  once 
moved  down  the  aisle,  everyone  making  way  for  him,  and  I 
close  behind.  Not  one  word  did  he  say  as  we  crossed  Copley 
Square,  and  made  for  the  rectory  on  its  corner.  He  opened  the 
door  and  passed  into  the  big  study  on  the  right.  It  was  win- 
ter, a  wood  fire  burned  in  the  big  fireplace,  and  beside  it,  close 
against  the  wall,  stood  his  own  great  chair,  where  in  the  even- 
ings when  he  was  not  working  he  always  sat.  In  the  wall  on 
his  right-hand  side  there  was  a  wooden  bracket;  on  the  bracket 
always  stood  a  box  of  big,  bad  cigars. 


A  DARK  NIGHT— A  GLORIOUS  MORNING     195 

Phillips  Brooks  had  not  said  one  word  since  we  left  the 
church.  He  sank  into  his  chair  with  a  grunt,  and  stretching 
his  great  bulk  slowly,  put  his  hand  into  the  box,  felt  it  from 
end  to  end — not  one  cigar!  Then  he  raised  himself  up  heavily, 
stood  before  the  fire,  kicked  the  empty  box  into  it.  "Damn  it 
all!  these  missionary  bishops  will  make  a  man  lose  his  soul." 
How  I  wished  that  the  boys  at  Harvard  who,  though  they  ad- 
mired, were  afraid  to  come  near  him  could  have  been  in  his 
study  that  night! 

I  have  told  this  story  about  the  great  missionary  meeting 
at  Montreal,  to  illustrate  what  anything  approaching  progres- 
sivism  had,  in  those  times,  to  contend  with  in  the  Canadian 
Episcopal  Church.  I  did  not  underestimate  the  power  of  my 
reactionary  neighbours,  either  in  Toronto  or  Montreal.  In 
St.  James's  these  were  led  by  a  man  of  very  unusual  force,  the 
Hon.  Samuel  Blake,  brother  to  Edward  Blake,  the  Liberal 
party  leader  at  Ottawa,  afterward  member  for  Cork,  Ireland 
(I  think),  in  the  Home  Rule  interest.  Sam  Blake  did  all  he 
could  to  make  the  Cathedral  impossible  to  me,  but  I  liked  him. 
He  was  a  good  man  and  an  honest  fighter.  If  what  he  believed 
to  be  the  Gospel  of  Jesus  was  the  best  presentation  of  it,  cer- 
tainly what  I  was  preaching  was,  to  say  the  least,  a  very  infe- 
rior brand  indeed.  He  believed  I  was  on  the  high  road  to 
heresy,  and  he  was  perfectly  right.  So  we  both  played  fair. 
When  he  came  to  me  and  said  he  would  resign  his  large  Bible 
class,  I  did  not  attempt  to  persuade  him  to  remain,  for  by  this 
time  I  began  to  see  my  way  clearly  to  build  up  in  Toronto  a 
great  free  and  open  liberal  church  for  the  people.  Not  an  easy 
task,  but  it  was  a  worthy  one.  I  felt  like  a  swimmer  with  the 
tide  under  him.  I  knew  I  had  with  me  the  youth  of  the  town. 
I  believed  that  the  sort  ofchurch  I  aimed  to  build  up  was  needed. 
I  had  absolute  confidence  in  my  people.  How  could  it  be 
otherwise,  they  who  had  been  so  patient  with  me,  so  faithfully 
standing  by  me  in  the  difficult  times  now  past  ? 

There  indeed  was  a  work  worth  doing,  and  I  felt  I  could  do  it. 


CHAPTER  XIV 
A  Unanimous  Call 

In  the  summer  of  1882  I  took  a  long  holiday  in  the 
Rocky  Mountains:  it  was  the  first  I  had  had  in  four  years. 
When  I  reached  Toronto  in  the  autumn,  serious  news  awaited 
me.  The  Dean  was  dead,  and  I  had  received  two  calls,  one  to 
England,  and  another  to  St.  George's  Church,  New  York.  Both 
I  refused  without  hesitation.  I  had  my  work  cut  out  for  me 
where  I  was.  In  Toronto  I  had  a  field  important  enough  to 
satisfy  any  reasonable  ambition,  and  I  loved  the  people  and  the 
place.  The  congregation  was  as  anxious  to  have  me  stay  as  I 
was  willing;  and  with  practical  unanimity  they  elected  me 
rector.  Then,  to  the  great  surprise  of  both  parties,  a  serious 
hitch  arose.  A  new  bishop  had  been  recently  elected.  He  had 
been  for  years  a  schoolmaster,  and  took  a  strict  view  of  what 
was  due  to  his  office  under  the  canon.  This  required  that  no 
appointment  should  be  made  to  the  rectory  of  St.  James's  till 
the  Bishop  had  first  been  consulted,  and  the  name  of  the 
proposed  rector  submitted  to  him. 

This  canon  had  not  been  rigorously  applied  in  the  diocese, 
and  the  vestry  had  failed  to  notify  the  Bishop  before  calling  me. 
The  Bishop  stood  on  his  undoubted  canonical  rights,  and  there 
arose  a  deadlock.  I  need  not  say  more.  Strong  feeling  was 
developed  in  the  church,  and  vestry  and  Bishop  locked  horns. 
The  situation  became  intolerable.  I  saw  that  no  good  could 
come  of  the  parish's  insistence  on  a  right  that  was  not  theirs. 
It  was  a  bitter  pill  to  swallow,  but  my  duty  was  clear.  In  some 
other  field  I  must  try  to  carry  out  the  plans  that  I  had  formed 
for  church  reform,  since  to  do  so  in  this  dear  field  that  I  had 
won  and  almost  lost  and  then  won  back  again,  was  denied 
me. 

196 


A  UNANIMOUS  CALL  197 

I  went  to  the  Bishop  and  told  him  that  I  thought  he  was 
making  a  grave  mistake,  but  that,  since  he  insisted  on  thwart- 
ing the  admitted  wish  of  the  congregation,  and  since  he  had 
a  technical  right  to  do  so,  I  would  not  permit  my  name  to  be 
any  longer  presented  to  him  as  candidate  for  the  rectorship. 
He  asked  me  if  I  would  consider  remaining  as  assistant  rector. 
I  said,  certainly  not.  And  so  came  to  a  sudden  end  perhaps  the 
best  four  years  of  my  life. 

I  had  not  sought  Toronto.  The  church  had  sought  me. 
How  well  I  remembered  the  first  day  in  London,  Ontario,  when 
I  met  members  of  its  vestry  who  came  on  to  beg  me  to  come  to 
them  and  hold  a  mission.  That  was  in  the  winter  of  1878. 
Then  the  three  months'  continued  preaching,  while  the  town 
was  all  astir.  Then  the  parting,  and  the  unexpected  call  and 
return.  And  then  those  dark  days  when  everything  seemed  to 
slip  away  from  me,  and  I  was  utterly  alone. 

And  then  at  last!  after  the  night,  "a  morning  without  clouds, 
a  clear  and  shining  morning  after  rain" — and  the  people's  faces 
in  the  big  church  shining  back  at  mine  as  I  spoke  to  them. 
And  the  new  warm  companionship  that  sprung  up  between  us, 
they  listened  and  I  spoke.  For  though  neither  they  nor  I 
knew  it,  we  both  had  been  passing  through  the  same  country, 
walking  side  by  side.  They  needed  what  I  needed,  and  the 
larger  liberty  and  light  I  had  won  for  my  soul,  their  souls  were 
hungry  for;  and  as  it  became  our  common  possession,  it  bound 
us  together  with  a  new  and  holy  tie. 

Of  all  this  I  was  just  becoming  aware  when  circumstances 
over  which  I  had  no  control  swept  me  away  to  a  different  and 
more  difficult  field  of  work.  My  plans  were  all  undone.  Ties 
that  had  grown  very  close  and  very  dear  must  be  snapped,  and 
I  must  leave  the  field  I  had  but  begun  to  sow  long  before  the 
time  of  harvesting.  Here  was  our  first  home.  Here  our  chil- 
dren had  been  born  to  us.  To  my  wife  and  myself  leaving 
Toronto  was  a  cruel  wrench. 

In  the  midst  of  the  deadlock  between  the  Cathedral  vestry 
and  the  Bishop  came  the  second  call  to  St.  George's.  It  was 
followed  by  a  telegram  saying  that  Mr.  J.  Pierpont  Morgan  and 
Mr.  J.  Noble  Stearns  were  coming  to  Toronto  to  see  me  and  to 
press  my  acceptance  of  the  call.  I  telegraphed  in  reply  that  I 
had  rather  they  allowed  me  to  come  to  New  York  to  see  them, 


198  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

and  there,  in  consultation  with  the  whole  of  St.  George's  vestry, 
go  over  matters. 

I  knew  already  something  about  the  church  and  its  present 
circumstances.  I  had  preached  twice  in  St.  George's,  once 
during  Doctor  Tyng's  pastorate  in  1 876.  I  preached  for  the  old 
gentleman  in  July,  to  a  mere  handful  of  people.  Again,  during 
the  pastorate  of  Doctor  Williams,  Doctor  Tyng's  successor,  in 
1878.     Then  also  to  a  mere  handful. 

Doctor  Williams  was  a  whole-hearted  servant  of  God  and 
man;  but  he  was  by  birth  and  training  a  Southerner,  and  was 
in  lower  New  York  very  much  of  a  round  peg  in  a  square  hole. 
When  I  stayed  with  him  he  was  thoroughly  discouraged.  He 
had  been  beaten,  he  said.  The  church  where  it  stood  was 
doomed.  The  Roman  Catholics  would  not  take  it  over  as  a 
mission.  Overtures  had  been  made  by  some  members  of  the 
vestry,  it  seems,  to  the  Roman  Catholics  for  a  sale  of  the  prop- 
erty. I  could  never  find  that  there  had  been  any  authoriza- 
tion for  this  offer,  if  it  had  been  made,  but  Doctor  Williams 
evidently  believed  the  report.  I  did  not  think  that  Doctor 
Williams  understood  New  York  or  his  vestry,  and  though  I 
had  stayed  only  two  days  with  him,  I  came  to  the  conclusion 
then,  that  to  give  up  the  teeming  neighbourhood  in  which  the 
church  stood  and  move  uptown  would  be  an  unwarranted 
retreat  in  the  face  of  the  enemy.  I  had  taken  a  couple  of  mis- 
sions in  uptown  New  York  churches  and  had  noticed  that 
these  churches  had  no  hold  on  the  working  people.  Round 
St.  George's,  the  street  and  little  parks,  such  as  they  were,  were 
packed  with  children.  Furthermore,  I  learned  from  my  own 
observation  and  from  Doctor  Williams,  that  though  St.  George's 
had  done  more  than  perhaps  any  other  New  York  church  in 
establishing  missions  for  these  poor  folks,  old  and  young, 
each  and  all  of  her  missions  were  either  on  the  high  road  to  fail- 
ure or  had  already  so  palpably  failed  that  they  had  been 
closed  up. 

Neither  Doctor  Williams  nor  any  of  the  clergy  I  met  in  New 
York  during  these  perambulating  mission  days  could  give  me 
any  reason  for  such  failures  as  these.  They  simply  said  it  was 
hard  to  get  the  poor  to  go  to  church.  To  me,  the  reason  of  the 
missionary  chapel's  almost  universal  failure  lay  much  deeper.  I 
had  seen  the  very  same  thing  in  Bethnal  Green  when  I  was  a 


A  UNANIMOUS  CALL  199 

boy,  and  in  the  large  English  cities  when  I  was  a  young 
cleric.  I  had  not  then  been  able  to  account  for  it  to  myself, 
but  in  the  intervening  years  the  explanation  had  come  to 
me. 

The  Evangelical  revival  had  saved  religious  life  in  England 
in  the  Eighteenth  Century.  It  had  done  lasting  good  in  the 
Nineteenth  Century.  But  it  was  petering  out  at  the  close 
of  that  century,  because  the  churches  had  not  made  any  effort 
to  enter  into  or  to  understand  the  social  needs  and  aspirations 
of  the  masses  of  the  people.  The  slow  filtration  of  education 
had  enlarged  immensely  the  human  outlook  of  millions.  Pain- 
fully, slowly,  but  determinedly,  these  were  surging  forward. 
But  the  Church  of  Jesus,  who  came  to  the  poor,  understood  the 
poor,  and  talked  to  the  poor,  had  let  the  poor  go — had  lost  touch 
with  them.  And  when  the  Church's  voice  did  reach  them,  in  the 
din  of  the  factory  or  the  unhealthful  crowding  of  the  slums,  it 
did  nothing  but  call  on  them  to  seek  a  future  salvation  from  a 
distant  catastrophe,  and  had  no  word  of  understanding  sym- 
pathy, nor  hands  of  ready  help,  to  save  them  or  rather  help 
them  to  save  themselves,  from  the  cruel  despotism  of  an  unjust 
economic  condition  and  an  environment  that  made  a  mockery 
of  all  hopes  of  home. 

In  short,  with  a  new  purposefulness  people  wanted  two  things 
— Justice  and  Brotherhood.  And  the  churches  were  giving 
them  neither  and  yet  deceived  themselves  into  fancying  that 
they  were  giving  them  both.  Just  think  of  it !  The  churches' 
customary  method  of  approach  to  the  poor  in  New  York  was 
to  send  green,  inexperienced  divinity  students,  who  had  never 
seen  the  inside  of  a  factory,  or  a  prison,  or  a  sweatshop,  or  a 
mine,  to  the  districts  out  of  which  the  great  churches  had  them- 
selves moved,  because  within  them  they  could  no  longer  fill 
their  pews.  And  the  expectation  was  that,  meagrely  supported 
with  funds  and  helpers,  these  youths  should  win  to  the  ugly 
little  mission  chapel  service  the  very  people  that  the  strong 
preacher  and  beautiful  service  had  failed  to  draw.  I  am  not 
drawing  a  caricature.  The  facts  are  bad  enough  as  they  stood, 
nay,  as  they  stand  to-day.  Surely  "something  is  rotten  in  the 
state  of  Denmark." 

As  I  sat  in  the  railroad  car  on  my  way  to  New  York,  these 
things  were  present  to  me.     I  knew  that  St.  George's  was  a  hard 


200  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

problem.  In  every  way  it  was  old-fashioned.  Doctor  Tyng 
had  been  perhaps  the  most  uncompromising  Evangelical  clergy- 
man in  the  United  States,  and  what  remained  of  the  church 
bodyguard  were  undoubtedly  his  spiritual  children.  How 
should  I  get  on  with  them  ?  Could  I  make  that  great  church  in 
any  sense  homelike  to  the  thousands  that  were  crowding  into 
the  houses  lately  transformed  from  dwellings  fit  for  one  family 
into  tenements  fit  for  none?  Better  men  than  I  had  failed. 
The  thing  seemed  too  difficult.  Why,  oh,  why,  through  no 
fault  of  mine,  had  I  to  leave  Toronto,  and  begin  among  stran- 
gers the  battle  all  over  again  ? 

Once  again  on  that  journey,  so  momentous  for  me,  in  thought 
I  stood  before  the  ugly  yellow  brick  Baptist  chapel  in  South 
London.  I  knew  I  was  not  seeking  my  own  happiness  or 
fortune,  and  peace  of  mind  came  to  me.  Nothing  could  make 
me  accept  St.  George's  unless  I  had  conditions  accorded  to  me 
that  gave  me  some  hopes  of  succeeding;  and  the  success  I  aimed 
for  was  an  unusual  kind  of  success.  I  would  aim  to  accomplish 
in  New  York  what  I  had  laid  plans  to  accomplish  in  Toronto. 
I  would  make  my  church  a  great  free  church,  open  to  all,  not  in 
name  only,  not  by  profession  only,  but  in  actual  operation. 
I  would  make  it  a  church  of  the  people,  a  truly  democratic 
church.  All  well  and  good.  But  what  probability  was  there 
that  the  vestry  had  either  the  will  or  the  power  to  act  with  me; 
nay,  more  than  that,  act  under  my  direction  in  a  course  so  novel 
and  so  revolutionary  in  its  change?  Was  there  any  likelihood 
of  their  coming  to  my  terms  ?  I  concluded  that  there  was  not 
one  chance  in  a  hundred  of  their  doing  so.  If  they  did  not, 
what  should  I  do  then?  That  lay  in  the  future;  one  thing  at  a 
time.  So  for  the  present  I  blotted  the  troublesome  uncer- 
tainty as  to  my  own  future  out  of  my  mind,  and  gave  all  my 
thought  to  the  coming  interview. 

I  was  met  at  the  depot  by  J.  Noble  Stearns,  one  of  the  vestry, 
and  we  went  at  once  to  Mr.  Morgan's  house  on  the  corner  of 
36th  Street  and  Madison  Avenue,  where  the  vestry  were  al- 
ready assembled  in  his  study.  All  were  more  than  kind  in  the 
greeting  they  gave  me.  Mr.  Charles  Tracy  acted  as  spokes- 
man. He  was  senior  warden.  He  did  not  seek  to  minimize  the 
serious  condition  of  St.  George's.  There  were  very  few  pew 
holders.     There  was  a  $35,000  floating  debt.     The  church  had 


A  UNANIMOUS  CALL  201 

had  a  splendid  endowment,  when  Trinity  set  it  on  its  own 
feet  as  a  parish,  in  181 1.  Thirty-two  lots,  excellent  property 
downtown,  it  had  owned.  All  but  two  of  these  lots  had  been 
sold  during  the  Tyng  regime.  In  fact,  the  great  church  now 
standing  had  been  chiefly  built  from  the  proceeds  of  their  sale. 
The  other  side  of  the  picture  was  rather  personal.  They  had 
heard  of  my  work.  Some  of  them  had  been  at  one  or  more  of 
my  tent  services  six  years  before.  If  I  would  come  they  would 
stand  by  me.  I  cannot  exaggerate  the  kindly  heartiness  with 
which  this  was  said. 

Then  my  turn  came,  and  briefly  but  as  clearly  as  I  could  I 
laid  before  them  my  plans  of  what  a  church  situated  as  was 
St.  George's  should  be.  "Gentlemen,"  I  said,  "that  is  the  only 
sort  of  church  I  would  care  to  be  rector  of,  but  frankly  I  think 
your  church  has  gone  too  far  to  be  pulled  up.  In  any  case,  I  do 
not  think  I  am  a  big  enough  man  to  pull  it  up." 

Mr.  Morgan  did  very  little  speaking  till  we  reached  this 
point.  I  think  he  had  scarcely  spoken  at  all.  He  turned  to 
me.  "Mr.  Rainsford,  will  you  be  our  rector?  If  you  consent 
I  will  do  what  I  can  to  help  you  carry  out  this  plan."  Turning 
to  the  others,  "Gentlemen,  do  you  agree  with  me?"  Then, 
again  turning  to  me,  "Will  you  accept  our  unanimous  call?" 

At  once  I  replied,  "  I  will,  on  three  conditions." 

"Name  them." 

"First,  you  must  make  the  church  absolutely  free.  Buy  out 
those  who  will  not  donate  their  pews.  Second,  abolish  all 
committees  in  the  church  except  the  vestry,  and  only  re- 
appoint such  as  I  shall  name.  Third,  I  must  have  an  annual 
fund  of  $10,000  for  three  years,  independent  of  my  salary, 
to  spend  as  I  see  fit  on  church  work.  My  salary  I  leave  to 
you." 

Dead  silence  followed.  I  saw  Mr.  Morgan  look  round  that 
circle  of  tense  faces.  Then  he  looked  full  at  me  and  said  one 
word:  "Done." 

I  don't  believe  usually  in  publishing  subscription  lists — but 
I  think  that  here  it  is  fitting  that  the  names  of  that  small  group 
of  men — who  loved  the  old  church — and  practically  made  her  a 
going  concern  when  hundreds  had  deserted  her — should  be 
recorded — W.  S.  R. 


202  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

New  York,  January  17,  1883. 

Minutes  of  St.  George's  Vestry 

Subscribers  to  $10,000  annual  fund  to  be  used  by  rector. 

Amounts 

J.  Pierpont  Morgan  $3j°°o 

David  Dows  3>oco 

John  D.  Wood  1,000 

Charles  Tracy  1,000 

Harvey  Spencer  500 

Jno.  N.  Stearns  2,000 


CHAPTER  XV 

St.  George's,  18831 

We  were  dreamers ■,  dreaming  greatly,  in  the  man-stifled  town; 

We  yearned  beyond  the  Sky-line  where  the  strange  roads  go  down. 
Came  the  Whisper,  came  the  Vision,  came  the  Power  with  the  Need, 

Till  the  soul  that  is  not  man's  soul  was  lent  us  to  lead. — R.  Kipling. 

In  Mr.  Morgan's  study  I  had  the  first  of  many  meetings 
with  a  right  noble  band  of  men.  Through  years  of  her  failing 
fortunes,  they  had  stood  by  a  church  that  all  of  them  had  at- 
tended since  they  were  young,  some  of  them  since  they  were 
boys.  I  could  see  at  a  glance  that  they  were  able,  and  very 
much  in  earnest.  They  had  so  quickly  accepted  my  astound- 
ing conditions  that  it  took  my  breath  away.  In  no  Protestant 
Episcopal  church  in  the  country  had  any  propositions  at  all 
like  them  ever  been  made  before.  Their  practical  result  could 
not  fail  to  be  to  give  the  rector  an  almost  autocratic  power  for 
three  years,  and  at  the  same  time  deny  to  the  vestry  itself  a 
voice  in  those  church  matters  usually  placed  under  its  control, 
such  as  music,  the  Sunday  School,  etc.,  etc. 

Here  let  me  say  I  had  not  spent  in  vain  my  years  of  preaching 
as  a  missioner.  Long  and  earnest  were  the  consultations  I 
often  had  with  my  clerical  hosts.  The  difficulties  besetting 
them  were  confidentially  poured  into  my  ears.  I  ought  to 
have  known  more  about  the  art  of  managing  or  mismanaging 
vestries  by  rectors  from  these  recounted  experiences  than  if  I 
had  had  a  long  parish  experience  of  my  own.  I  had  become 
convinced  that  the  success  or  failure  of  a  church  depends 
absolutely  on  the  man  that  steers  it.  If  he  is  a  good  helmsman 
he  will  carry  crew  and  cargo  safely  through.  If  he  is  a  poor 
one,  the  crew  cannot  save  him  from  disaster.  And  in  either 
case  the  crew's  business  is  not  at  the  tiller  but  on  the  "sheets." 

^pace  forbids  my  giving  at  length  the  previous  history  of  St.  George's  Church.  It  will  be 
found  in  "History  of  St.  George's  Church,  New  York." — Rev.  Henry  Anstice,  D.  D. — Harper 
Bros.  191 1. 

203 


2o4  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Now  if  a  church  has  been  steadily  going  down  for  many  years, 
as  had  St.  George's,  it  is  inevitable  that  owing  to  change  in 
the  command,  power  falls  automatically  into  the  vestry's  hands 
which  it  is  unfitted  to  exercise.  And  so  it  comes  about  that 
even  an  exemplary  vestry,  composed  of  capable  and  self-denying 
men,  will  run  a  church  into  the  ground;  for  a  committee 
cannot  run  a  church  any  more  than  it  can  lead  an  army.  I 
knew  well  that  an  uphill  job  awaited  me  whether  I  succeeded  or 
failed.  I  had  an  empty  church  and  an  empty  treasury,  and  a 
vast,  unchurched  population  around  me  to  be  won.  To  reach 
the  neighbourhood  would  tax  to  the  uttermost  any  gifts  I  had. 
If  in  addition  to  fishing  for  men  I  must  go  round,  as  clergy 
usually  had  to,  and  fish  for  dollars,  I  was  undone.  That  was 
my  reason  for  making  the  third  condition. 

Then  I  knew  that  my  ideas  of  the  sort  of  music  that  would 
help  our  worship  were — well,  my  own;  not  quite  the  current 
ideas.  And  if  I  had  to  wrestle  with  a  music  committee,  no 
matter  how  competent,  in  order  to  have  my  way,  again  I  should 
be  undone.  And  thirdly,  my  whole  plan  and  purpose  made 
an  absolutely  free  and  open  church  a  sine  qua  non.  In  short, 
my  plans  for  St.  George's  future  necessitated  a  complete  de- 
parture from  St.  George's  past. 

As  I  look  back  I  am  really  surprised  at  my  own  audacity, 
and  as  much  surprised  at  the  whole-hearted  and  enthusiastic 
acceptance  of  it  by  the  vestry.  To  them  was  due,  in  far 
greater  measure  than  the  public  could  know,  the  success  we 
won.  My  senior  warden  was  Charles  Tracy.  In  his  profes- 
sion of  the  law  few  stood  as  high  as  he.  Others  may  have  been 
more  brilliant,  but  his  fine  rectitude  and  wide  culture  made 
him  a  man  apart.  He  was  seventy  when  I  met  him,  but  he  was 
still  young.  During  the  first  months  of  my  rectorship  I  used  to 
go  round  to  his  house  in  East  17th  Street  on  Sunday  evenings, 
and  he  and  I  counted  the  envelope  subscriptions  and  the  cash. 
It  did  not  take  us  long.  A  kind  and  wise  friend  he  was  to  me. 
He  was  an  influential  member  of  the  Century  Club,  and  some- 
how or  other  he  secured  my  election  to  that  most  delightful  of 
all  clubs  in  an  undeservedly  short  time. 

The  junior  warden  was  David  Dows,  all  his  life  a  faithful 
attendant  at  church  but  never  a  communicant.  Mr.  Dows  was 
to  me  a  quite  new  type  of  man — the  self-made  millionaire.     He 


ST.  GEORGE'S,  1883  205 

seemed  a  lonely  man,  growing  more  lonely  as  he  aged.  Most  of 
his  friends  had  gone,  and  he  was  not  at  home  among  the  younger 
people.  Business  had  been  his  life.  Recreations  he  had  none, 
and  of  books  he  was  ignorant;  a  grizzled  veteran  of  Wall  Street, 
who  had,  in  unscrupulous  days,  won  his  place  in  the  front.  At 
that  first  vestry  meeting  he  had  been  an  absentee,  and  I  had 
to  win  him.  This  I  set  out  to  do  without  delay.  I  made  sev- 
eral visits  to  Mr.  Dows,  and  the  more  I  saw  of  him  the  more  he 
appealed  to  me.  He  wanted  to  be  a  Christian,  and  he  didn't 
know  how.  For  six  days  in  the  week,  during  a  long  life,  he  had 
indefatigably  served  Mammon.  He  knew  it,  and  he  said  so. 
And  on  the  seventh,  he  had  listened  for  many  and  many  a  year 
to  the  extremest,  the  most  uncompromising  statement  possible, 
of  the  Evangelical  "plan  of  salvation."  It  evidently  did  not 
satisfy  David  Dows,  but  he  knew  no  other  statement  that  did. 
One  evening  as  I  sat  with  him  in  his  great  new  house  on  the 
corner  of  69th  Street  and  Fifth  Avenue,  he  said  suddenly  to  me, 
"Rector,  why  don't  you  speak  to  me  about  my  soul?"  I  re- 
plied, "I  would  gladly,  Mr.  Dows,  do  so  if  you  wish  me  to." 
Said  he,  "I  do  wish  it.  Come  down  to  my  office  to-morrow; 
there  we  can  be  quite  alone." 

What  passed  next  day  between  us  is  of  too  intimate  a  nature 
to  print  even  here;  but  I  left  my  warden's  office  with  a  deep  re- 
spect for  the  fine  honesty  of  soul  that  he  permitted  me  to  see. 
Some  said  hard  things  of  David  Dows.  He  said  hard  things  of 
himself.  But  what  was  rare  and  fine  about  him  was,  that 
he  said  no  single  hard  thing  about  any  one  else  but  himself.  One 
thing  he  said  was  unforgettable:  "The  Bible  says  you  cannot 
serve  God  and  Mammon.  That's  true.  Many  a  time  I 
have  gone  into  this  inner  office  and  locked  the  door  and  kneeled 
down  and  prayed  for  strength  not  to  grovel;  but  the  Street  has 
always  been  too  much  for  me." 

I  don't  know  that  I  was  much  help  to  my  junior  warden,  but 
from  that  day  I  most  certainly  loved  and  respected  him,  and  till 
he  died,  I  saw  regularly  that  grizzled  face  looking  into  mine, 
generally  twice  a  day  on  Sundays  in  St.  George's  Church. 

I  had  called  on  Mr.  Dows  on  business  matters  before  the 
visits  I  have  here  referred  to,  and  the  first  of  my  calls  was  the 
only  one  in  which  I  ever  had  any  difference  with  him.  The 
church  had  notes  out  for  $35,000;  to  meet  these  was  my  duty, 


2o6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

one  I  did  not  relish,  but  it  had  to  be  done  and  done  at  once.  So 
I  went  to  my  councillor,  Charles  Tracy.  Said  he,  "Go  to  Mr. 
Dows  first.  He  is  the  only  very  rich  man  in  the  church.  Get 
as  much  as  you  can  from  him.  Mr.  Morgan  will,  I  think,  do  the 
same,  and  perhaps  Mr.  Stearns  will  give  half  as  much." 

Be  patient  with  me,  dear  reader,  if  it  seems  to  you  that  these 
details  are  not  worthy  of  record,  but  this  was  my  very  first  and 
also  my  last  experiment  in  church  finance.  I  had  no  organiza- 
tion, remember,  but  my  vestry.  I  had  practically  no  congre- 
gation; just  a  great  empty  church.  And  much  depended  on 
my  ability  to  meet  the  sudden  problem  that  had  arisen.  I  had 
practically  told  the  vestry  that  I  proposed  to  "run"  St.  George's 
my  own  way.  I  must  now  prove  to  them  that  I  could  make 
good.  In  later  times  I  never  had  any  difficulties  over  finances. 
We  always  agreed,  the  vestry  and  I.  When  they  knew  more 
about  a  question  than  I  did,  they  very  properly  had  their  way. 
When  it  was  a  matter  of  church  policy,  of  what  St.  George's 
stood  for,  they  let  me  have  mine,  and  to  a  man  backed  me  every 
time  (as  I  shall  hereafter  tell). 

Well,  this  was  my  first  meeting  with  Mr.  Dows,  and  I  had 
to  try  and  get  from  him  a  large  sum  of  money.  I  had  worked 
the  matter  out  in  my  mind,  and  had  concluded  that  I  must 
have  $10,000  from  him  and  $10,000  from  Mr.  Morgan.  That 
would  leave  $15,000  still  to  raise.  Mr.  Stearns  would  prob- 
ably give  another  $5,000  and  I  would  have  to  struggle,  and 
struggle  hard,  for  the  last  $10,000. 

I  laid  the  matter  before  Mr.  Dows.  He  listened  attentively. 
"Mr.  Rainsford,  I  approve.  You  are  right  that  $35,000  must 
be  raised  at  once.  We  cannot  have  the  church's  name  on 
paper.     I  will  give  you  $5,000,  sir." 

"But,  Mr.  Dows,  that  won't  do.  Where  am  I  to  get  the 
other  $30,000?  If  you,  the  warden,  give  only  $5,000,  no  one  in 
the  vestry  will  give  more  than  you  do.  Mr.  Morgan  will  give 
$5,000  perhaps,  and  I  may  be  able  to  scrape  together  another 
five,  and  I  am  then  left  with  $20,000  still  to  raise.  I  can't  pos- 
sibly do  it,  sir.     There  is  no  congregation  to  raise  it  from." 

"Mr.  Rainsford,  $5,000  is  a  great  deal  of  money.  I  won't 
give  you  another  dollar." 

I  saw  I  was  up  against  it  with  a  vengeance,  so  I  rose  and  said, 
"Mr.  Dows,  I  have  come  among  you  to  try  and  save  the  old 


ST.  GEORGE'S,  1883  207 

church.  I  give  you  my  word  that  I  will  do  my  best,  but  I 
have  a  right  to  expect  the  only  band  of  men  that  remain  in 
St.  George's  to  do  their  best,  too,  and  this  business  of  paying 
off  debts  you  have  incurred  is  by  rights  not  mine  at  all  but 
yours.  Won't  you  give  me  $10,000?  I  cannot  do  with  less. 
If  you  give  me  ten,  I  think  Mr.  Morgan  will  duplicate  it,  and 
Mr.  Stearns  will  give  five,  and  somehow  I'll  get  the  rest." 

"No,  sir.     I'll  give  $5,000  and  no  more." 

"Then,  Mr.  Dows,  I  won't  take  your  $5,000."  And  I  went 
home. 

Next  morning  there  came  to  me  a  kind  note  from  Mr. Dows, 
enclosing  his  cheque  for  $10,000,  and  an  invitation  to  dine  with 
him  the  first  evening  I  was  free. 

J.  Noble  Stearns  was  one  of  the  best  men  I  have  ever  known. 
He  was  a  man  who  carried  the  religion  of  Jesus  into  his  daily 
life.  Everything  he  had  was  at  the  service  of  the  old  church 
he  loved.  He  alone  of  the  vestry  had  taken  a  leading  part  in 
religious  work.  St.  George's  had  been  famous  for  its  success 
in  Sunday-school  development  and  J.  Noble  Stearns  had  for 
many  years  been  one  of  the  teachers,  and  to  see  the  church 
school  and  the  mission  schools  fail  hurt  him.  He  had  been  to 
Toronto  months  before  the  second  call  came  to  me,  and  had 
hoped  to  go  over  the  affairs  of  St.  George's  with  me  before  the 
formal  call  came.  I  was  at  the  time  in  the  Rocky  Mountains, 
but  he  saw  Mrs.  Rainsford,  and  got  a  fairly  good  idea  of  what 
I  had  done  and  was  aiming  to  do.  He  saw  the  value  of  my 
insistence  on  free  church  from  the  first.  He  knew  more  about 
what  St.  George's  needed  than  any  other  member  of  the  vestry, 
for  he  had  worked  among  the  children  of  the  neighbourhood. 
And  so  it  came  about  that  in  any  effort  I  made  to  democratize 
the  church,  and,  what  was  a  much  more  delicate  matter  (as  I 
proved  later),  to  democratize  my  vestry,  he  stood  by  me  against 
all  opposition,  even  when  that  opposition  came  from  those  old 
friends  whose  support  was  of  vital  moment  to  himself. 

I  had  more  in  common  with  Mr.  Stearns  than  with  any  other 
member  of  the  vestry.  We  had  both  commenced  our  religious 
life  believing  in  the  total  depravity  of  all  men.  As  we  worked 
among  our  fellows,  we  had  discarded  this  dreadful  Calvinistic 
creed.  I  never  knew  a  man  who  was  more  ready  than  he  to 
accept  and  understand  the  new,  beautiful,  and  hopeful  things, 


208  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

"breaking  forth  from  God's  word,"  in  men  themselves,  men 
who  were  ever  rising  on  "stepping  stones  of  their  dead  selves  to 
higher  things";  men  who,  though  they  had  come  from  the 
animal  world,  could  not  be  confined  to  it  because  in  all  of  them 
was  a  bit  of  God. 

During  the  happy  twenty-four  years  I  was  rector  of  St. 
George's  I  had  at  times  some  fighting  to  do;  never  for  myself, 
I  am  thankful  to  say;  but  for  things  I  thought  were  necessary, 
and  for  right  policies  in  the  church's  conduct.  Sometimes  a 
friend  left  me;  often  a  friend  differed  from  me;  but  J.  Noble 
Stearns,  my  junior  warden,  never  left  my  side. 

I  had  two  great  advantages  in  coming  to  St.  George's.  The 
first  was  the  emptiness  of  the  church.  There  had  been  an 
interim  of  two  years,  after  Doctor  Williams  resigned,  during 
which  the  church  was  without  a  rector.  Several  had  been 
"called,"  but  the  rectorate  had  been  declined.  I  found  about 
twenty  families  that  were  still  in  partly  regular  attendance. 
Among  these  I  knew  full  well  I  would  discover  some  who  were 
far  from  approving  of  a  free  church.  They  resented  a  policy 
that  called  on  them  to  surrender  their  property  rights  in  their 
pews.  Some  might  be  prepared  within  reasonable  limits  to  be 
hospitable  to  strangers.  Others  felt  as  the  Scotsman  did,  who 
complained  to  his  rector  that  a  gentleman  not  of  his  acquaint- 
ance had  been  put  into  his  pew. — "I  would  not  disturb  divine 
service  by  putting  him  out,  Sir,  but  I  took  the  liberty  of 
sitting  on  his  hat."  (In  those  days  they  wore  tall  "chimney 
pots.")  And  so  I  was  glad  that  their  number  was  no  larger. 
Some  of  the  twenty  soon  left,  and  of  this  I  was  glad,  for  de- 
partures were  less  depressing  than  funerals,  and  it  had  to  be  one 
or  the  other. 

My  second  advantage  was  that  we  began  very  unostenta- 
tiously and  put  no  advertisements  in  the  papers.  I  insisted  on 
this,  for  I  wanted  to  feel  my  way.  I  wanted  to  be  sure  what  I 
would  do  and  not  do;  where  I  had  best  leave  things  alone  and 
where  change  them.  Crowds  of  curious  "casuals"  are  an  un- 
profitable and  disturbing  element.  I  wanted  first  to  know 
pretty  thoroughly  what  material  I  had  ready  to  hand  in  the 
Sunday  School  and  the  church.  Then  I  had  to  study  "the 
plant"  of  St.  George's,  making  up  my  mind  where  I  could 
change,  and  where  it  was  necessary  to  discard  or  create. 


ST.  GEORGE'S,  1883  209 

The  building  itself,  while  impressive  outside,  specially  so 
long  as  the  open  stone-work  towers  were  standing,  was  sadly 
ugly  and  depressing  inside;  and,  in  addition  to  this,  was  about 
as  hard  a  building  to  hear  in  as  an  architect  had  ever  devised. 
Its  great  flat  stone  wall  spaces  made  the  voice  of  the  preacher 
rattle  from  side  to  side  like  peas  in  a  shaken  bladder.  The 
effect  when  a  great  congregation  sang  was  fine.  The  reso- 
nance helped  the  music,  but  when  the  preacher  spoke  from  the 
low  pulpit,  near  the  Holy  Table,  the  echo  was  baffling. 

The  change  from  the  warm-hearted  crowd  of  St.  James's 
Cathedral  to  the  empty  ugliness  of  St.  George's  was  at  first 
rather  chilling,  but  my  extraordinarily  kind  and  trusting  recep- 
tion by  the  vestry  filled  me  with  purposeful  hope  and  courage. 

St.  Paul  says  that  "at  Ephesus  a  great  door  and  effectual 
was  opened  unto  him,  and  that  there  were  many  adversaries." 
I  saw  the  great  door  wide  open,  in  those  teeming  streets  and 
crowding  baby-carriages  in  the  neglected  Stuyvesant  Park. 
And  as  to  the  adversaries!  Why,  in  my  case  they  never 
materialized,  or  if  they  did  there  were  but  few  of  them.  I 
felt  sure  that  with  the  backing  of  such  men  as  I  had  behind 
me,  we  could  win  to  the  old,  empty,  misunderstood  church 
some  at  least  of  the  thousands  who,  though  they  knew  it  not, 
needed  sorely  what  she  had  to  give  them. 

To  put  my  plans  briefly,  before  all  else  I  wanted  to  under- 
stand my  neighbourhood,  and  did  not  want  to  draw  a  curious 
crowd  from  all  over  town,  even  supposing  that  I  could  do  it. 
This  was  my  reason  for  putting  a  ban  on  advertising  the  ser- 
vices. I  had  had  experiences,  too,  while  a  mission  preacher,  of 
the  extraordinary  twists  and  distortions  to  which  the  sermon 
is  often  put  when  placed  before  the  public  on  Monday  morning 
in  the  daily  press.  I  will  give  an  amusing  instance  of  how  I 
suffered  at  a  later  time,  when  St.  George's  was  crowded.  The 
city  editor  of  the  New  York  Herald  wrote  me  a  kind  note,  say- 
ing that  his  paper  was  anxious  to  publish  a  full  report  of  a 
Sunday  morning  sermon,  and  asked  me,  since  the  church  was 
always  crowded,  to  provide  a  chair  so  placed  that  their  stenog- 
rapher could  "get  me"  accurately.  Mr.  W.  H.  Schieffelin, 
who  was  then  in  charge  of  the  delicate  job  of  seating  the  con- 
gregation, had  the  chair  ready.  It  was  placed  right  under  the 
pulpit. 


210  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

My  sermon  was  on  evolution.  I  cannot  remember  the  text, 
but  I  quoted  at  length  Professor  Carruth's  beautiful  poem  on 
evolution  beginning: 

A  fire  mist  and  a  planet — 
A  crystal  and  a  cell — 
A  jelly  fish  and  a  saurian 

And  a  cave  where  the  cave  men  dwell; 
Then  a  sense  of  law  and  beauty 
And  a  face  raised  from  the  clod — 
Some  call  it  evolution 
And  others  call  it  God. 

As  I  preached  I  had  occasion  to  use  many  times  the  word 
"saurian."  On  Monday,  I  had  the  honour  of  a  long  report  in 
the  Herald,  right  enough,  but  the  nonsense  I  was  made  to  talk 
may  be  imagined  when  I  say  that  in  each  and  every  place  where 
I  said  "saurian"  the  Herald  made  me  say  "Saviour." 

St.  George's  stands  facing  the  east,  looking  over  Stuyvesant 
Square,  which  is  cut  in  two  by  Second  Avenue.  Stuyvesant 
Square  had  not  so  completely  fallen  from  grace  as  had  its 
neighbour,  Tompkins  Square,  where  in  those  days  you  took 
considerable  chances  if  you  walked  across  it  at  night.  But  it 
was  a  dirty,  neglected  mockery  of  what  a  city  park  might  be. 
Its  fountains  were  waterless,  the  basins  filled  with  rubbish  from 
the  street.  I  myself  saw  dead  cats  and  empty  tomato  cans 
piled  in  them.  There  was  no  attempt  to  plant  flowers  or  renew 
the  long-neglected  grass,  or  to  protect  the  park  at  all. 

One  of  the  first  things  I  did  was  to  visit  the  families  whose 
names  I  found  remaining  on  the  church  roll.  Looking  over 
my  list,  I  noticed  the  name  "Croker."  I  made  inquiries,  and 
found  that  the  famous  Tammany  boss's  mother  was  one  of  my 
members,  and  was  then  an  old  woman  living  on  Staten  Island. 
Duty  and  policy  suggested  an  immediate  call.  I  found  a 
charming  old  lady,  who  evidently  appreciated  my  searching  her 
out,  and  asked  me  to  return  and  give  her  the  Holy  Communion. 
This  I  did.  Not  long  after  I  had  a  very  courteous  letter  from 
Mr.  Croker,  saying  that  he  appreciated  my  taking  the  long  trip 
to  Staten  Island  to  see  his  mother,  who  had  not  had  a  clerical 
call  for  years,  and  that  he  hoped  I  would  remember  that  at  any 
time  he  would  be  glad  to  pay  me  any  courtesy  in  his  power. 

After  that,  the  change  in  our  park,  if  not  immediate,  was 


ST.  GEORGE'S,  1883  211 

assured;  and  in  time  we  had  quite  beautiful  flowers  grouped 
round  the  fountains,  and,  what  was  even  more  important  than 
a  restored  beauty,  we  had  the  invaluable  service  and  coopera- 
tion of  an  intelligent  and  sympathetic  park  policeman,  who 
greatly  helped  us  for  many  years.  Then  I  had  Japanese  creeper 
planted  round  the  brownstone  walls  of  the  church,  and  this 
added,  specially  in  autumn  time,  to  the  quiet  beauty  of  the 
square. 

St.  George's,  in  the  '6o's,  had  been  successful.  Since  1 865  it 
had  slowly  fallen  down.  I  found  it  empty,  expensive  to  run, 
and  very  costly  to  heat;  ill-adapted  in  many  ways  to  the  work  it 
ought  to  do. 

Evidently  the  old  methods  were  a  total  failure.  New  ones 
must  be  invented.  When  I  found  my  vestry  disturbed  a  little 
at  the  radical  changes  I  proposed,  I  told  them  a  story  I  had 
heard  by  the  banks  of  a  Canadian  salmon  river.  The  salmon 
had  ceased  to  visit  the  stream,  and  the  scattered  settlers  on  its 
banks,  who  had  depended  on  their  salmon  nets,  were  in  a  bad 
way  for  a  living.  All  but  one  man.  He,  cannier  than  the  rest, 
sold  his  salmon  nets  and  bought  smelt  nets.  He  changed  the 
size  of  his  mesh,  and  soon  was  better  off  than  he  had  been  before. 

The  old  methods  of  all  the  Protestant  churches  were  adapted 
to  the  family.  The  new  must  be  adapted  to  the  individual. 
The  days  of  the  Individual  were  upon  us,  let  us  deplore  it  as 
we  might.  The  essential  principle  I  stood  for  took  shape  in 
what,  very  inaccurately,  came  to  be  called  the  "institutional 
Church." 

My  first  move  was  to  make  the  outside  of  the  church  and  its 
setting  in  its  little  park  more  tidy  and  attractive.  The  next, 
to  change  as  much  as  possible  what  was  amiss  in  the  inside. 
Here  my  vestry  backed  me  up  with  extraordinary  unanimity. 
We  not  only  declared  the  church  free,  but  we  made  men  and 
women  and  children  feel  that  it  was  free.  We  elected  Mr. 
William  H.  Schieffelin,  who  lived  in  the  Square,  to  the  vestry. 
He  came  to  me  a  few  Sundays  after  my  arrival  and  offered  his 
help.  For  many  years  following  that  day,  Sunday  by  Sunday, 
rain  or  shine,  half  an  hour  before  service  time,  in  the  evening  as 
well  as  morning,  he  stood  at  the  church  door.  Patient,  good- 
tempered,  always  wisely  discriminating,  absolutely  fair  and 
without  partiality,  never  ruffled,  always  resourceful,  no  crowd- 


212  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

ing  affected  his  nerves.  At  times  his  task  was  a  peculiarly 
difficult  one,  yet  in  its  fulfillment  he  always  proved  himself  a 
courteous  and  capable  gentleman.  I  felt  sure  that  as  long  as 
he  was  at  his  post  there  would  never  be  any  unnecessary  fric- 
tion, and  regular  attendants  and  strangers  would  both  be  made 
to  feel  the  welcome  of  a  church  home. 

Such  a  man  could  not  fail  to  gather  round  him  men  of  like 
mind,  and  this  Mr.  Schieffelin  did.  I  left  the  whole  difficult, 
delicate  matter  of  seating  the  crowds  that  thronged  us  for 
years  to  him.  He  saved  me  all  care.  Mr.  Harvey  Spencer 
ably  assisted  Mr.  Schieffelin  in  very  early  days. 

On  the  question  of  free  church  I  stand  to-day  where  I  stood 
then.  There  should  be  one  place  besides  the  grave — to  which 
all  should  have  a  common  right:  that  place  is  the  Church  of  God. 
To  my  mind,  as  between  free  church  and  pew  church,  there  is 
no  choice  at  all.  The  one  is  right;  the  other  is  wrong.  You 
cannot  preach  one  thing  from  the  pulpit  and  practise  another 
in  the  pew.  I  do  not  care  how  liberal  pew-holders  may  be,  or 
how  hospitable  they  may  show  themselves.  To  own  or  rent  a 
foot  of  the  floor  of  the  house  we  claim  to  be  the  House  of  God 
is  to  contradict  and  deny  in  practice  the  Gospel  of  Jesus.  In 
theory  at  least,  in  this  as  in  many  other  matters,  the  custom  of 
the  Roman  Catholic  Church  is  better,  wiser,  more  apostolic 
than  is  the  custom  of  those  churches  which  have  broken  away 
from  her. 

In  the  early  '8o's  the  free  church  ideal  was  not  popular,  and 
many  were  the  arguments  I  had  with  clerical  brethren  on  ac- 
count of  it.  In  the  "club,"  an  unusually  able  body  of  clergy, 
to  which  I  had  the  honour  of  being  elected,  I  stood  alone  on  that 
question.  I  had  fallen  foul  of  Phillips  Brooks  when  in  Boston, 
on  the  question  of  free  church.  With  him  I  did  not  venture  an 
argument.  It  was  not  much  use  arguing  with  Phillips  Brooks. 
I  just  held  my  ground.  Years  after,  when  he  was  Bishop,  he 
visited  me,  and  then  said:  "We  all  laughed  at  your  pleas  for  free 
church,  but  you  were  right,  and  I  was  wrong.  What  influence 
I  have  as  Bishop  of  Massachusetts  I  shall  steadily  use  to  make 
every  church  in  the  diocese  free." 

Inside  the  church,  Mr.  Schieffelin  and  his  band  of  sides-men 
stood  for  a  radical  change  of  policy;  and  in  simple  and  natural 
ways,  there  was  evident  at  the  church  door,  Sunday  by  Sunday, 


ST.  GEORGE'S,  1883  213 

a  spirit  of  welcome  that  did  great  good.  I  always  tried  to  be 
there  and  to  greet  not  only  strangers  but  those  I  had  visited. 
J.  Pierpont  Morgan  was  always  there,  and  his  presence  meant 
a  great  deal  even  in  the  remote  '8o's. 

Later,  when  I  had  a  staff  of  assistant  clergy,  I  made  as  many 
introductions  as  I  could  during  those  crowded  minutes  before 
service  began.  Thus  it  was  we  wrought  a  change  in  the  inside 
temperature  of  the  old  church. 

The  next  change  I  strove  for  was  in  the  church  music,  and 
here  I  first  encountered  opposition.  My  plans  were  revolu- 
tionary— nothing  less  than  a  new  organ,  new  organist,  new 
choir,  and  a  complete  change  of  the  whole  plant  from  the  east 
end  of  the  church  to  the  west  end,  where  stood  the  Communion 
Table.  I  wanted  congregational  singing.  Quartet  and  double 
quartet  to  me  were  anathema,  for  with  them  congregational 
singing  was  impossible.  I  could  not  pay  for  good  soloists, 
even  if  I  wanted  them.  Moreover,  I  had  my  own  settled  idea  of 
what  St.  George's  choir  should  be.  Its  front  line  should  be  of 
boys,  drawn  from  its  own  Sunday  School.  Back  of  them  must 
be  women,  for  the  quality  of  an  American  boy's  voice  is  too 
thin,  too  sharp,  to  serve  adequately  in  soprano  parts,  and  needs 
the  richer  support  of  the  female  voice  tone.  I  am  speaking  of 
course  of  the  material  I  had,  or  could  hope  to  have,  to  my  hand. 
With  time  and  large  means  the  right  sort  of  boys'  voices  can 
be  found  and  trained;  but  I,  having  neither  time  nor  money, 
could  not  hope  to  have  good  congregational  singing  led  by  male 
voices  alone. 

There  was  another  reason,  too.  I  did  dearly  want  to  make 
the  services  of  the  church  appeal  to  a//y  not  part  of  my  peo- 
ple. I  wanted  a  chancel  choir,  but  I  wanted  it  of  women 
as  well  as  of  boys  and  men,  and  this  being  my  aim,  that  choir 
must  be  a  surpliced  choir.  There  lay  the  difficulty.  My  vestry 
was  divided.  Surpliced  choir  in  old  St.  George's!  That  was 
too  much,  even  for  them.  Hence  my  first  opposition.  That 
was  forty  years  ago  (though  I  can  scarcely  believe  it),  and  it 
may  be  hard  for  a  younger  generation  to  enter  into  their  feeling; 
but  the  change  I  advocated  could  not  fail  to  seem  to  some  of  my 
vestry  a  deliberate  flouting  of  what  the  old  church  had  so  stoutly 
stood  for  in  the  days  of  its  strength  and  glory. 

Over  this  controversy  one  or  two  of  my  vestry  left  me,  and 


2i4  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Mr.  Morgan  took  a  good  deal  of  persuading  before  I  got  him 
to  my  view.  But  he  came  to  it  finally,  and  then  headed  the 
list  of  subscribers  that  put  up  the  very  considerable  amount 
of  money  my  changes  called  for. 

The  congregations  at  first  were  small — some  two  hundred 
and  fifty.  I  had  the  ushers  show  all  who  came  to  seats  well 
up  in  front.  Propinquity  counts  for  something  in  worship, 
and  I  locked  the  galleries  up  for  several  months.  I  preached 
poorly,  and  I  knew  it.  It  has  always  been  so  with  me.  I  can- 
not remember  ever  having  made  a  specially  successful  start  in 
anything  I  attempted  to  do,  except  in  my  mission  at  Toronto. 

I  noted  the  faces  before  me  morning  by  morning.  (This 
was  not  hard  to  do,  for  there  was  no  crowd.)  One  man  partic- 
ularly I  saw,  who  came  regularly.  In  the  plates  carried  in 
the  central  aisle  there  lay  a  note  of  considerable  amount  when- 
ever he  was  there.  Mr.  Tracy  and  I,  who  did  the  counting, 
talked  this  over.  (Remember,  these  were  the  days  of  small 
things.)  Then  one  Sunday  I  asked  for  $500  to  start  a  lending 
library  for  the  children  of  the  Sunday  School.     On  the  plate 

that  day  was  a  cheque  for  $250,  signed  "A.  C.  C ."     How 

well  I  remember  it !    It  was  the  very  first  that  had  come  to  me 

on  the  church  plate.     I  found  Mr.  C 's  address  and  called 

to  thank  him  for  his  help,  and  to  explain  why  I  specially  wanted 
that  library  for  my  East  Side  children.  There  was  a  little 
library  of  sorts — oh,  such  sorts! — too  goody-goody  to  interest 
or  help  any  healthy  child. 

Mr.  C asked  me  to  dinner,  and  I  saw  that  he  was  deeply 

interested  in  St.  George's.  He  made  me  tell  him  my  plans. 
He  evidently  was  prepared  to  approve  them,  and  was  whole- 
heartedly free  church.  "Now,"  said  he:  "What  about  your 
music?  It  should  be  first  class."  I  agreed,  naturally,  and  we 
fell  to  talking  about  the  music.     Alas,  I  quickly  realized  that 

here  I  had  one  idea  and  Mr.  C another.     I  wanted  a  choir 

of  my  people,  and  by  my  people;  and  as  far  as  possible  a  volun- 
tary body.  He  had  in  view  the  best  organist  and  the  best 
double  quartet  that  could  be  had  for  money.  I  wanted  a  choir 
formed  out  of  St.  George's  itself,  part  of  the  church's  life,  an 
organization  so  attractive  that  my  prospective  East  Side  boys 
and  girls  (I  had  not  got  them  yet)  should  plan  and  study  to 
win  entrance  to  it.     A  choir  where  brownstone-housed  ladies 


ST.  GEORGE'S,  1883  215 

and  Wanamaker's  "shop  ladies"  should  sit  side  by  side.     Mr. 

C listened,  interested,  but  I  could  see  that  he  was  not 

enthusiastic  over  my  choir  dream. 

Mr.  C was  one  of  my  audience  the  very  first  Sunday  I 

preached,  and  he  attended  regularly  for  some  months.  During 
that  time  I  saw  him  several  times.  We  were  growing;  the 
morning  and  evening  congregations  increasing.  But  though 
we  were  out  of  debt,  we  were  not  yet  paying  the  running  ex- 
penses of  the  church — and  there  were  so  many  things  that 
might  be  attempted,  if  only  we  had  the  money!  And  here  was 
a  man  who  had  the  money,  and  seemed  to  have  a  hearty  will 
to  help  us. 

One  evening,  after  dinner  at  his  apartment,  Mr.  C 

asked  me  into  his  study  and  said:  "I  am  heartily  with  you. 
Tell  me  frankly  your  plans  for  the  future.  I  don't  ask  out  of 
curiosity;  I  want  to  stand  back  of  you."  So  I  told  him  what, 
till  then,  I  had  spoken  of  to  no  one.  Told  of  a  building  I 
wanted,  large,  beautiful,  commodious,  where  rich  and  poor 
should  meet;  a  building  that  should  be  a  visible  evidence  of  the 
church's  recognition  of  the  needs  and  wrongs  of  the  city  toilers 
and  their  children.  It  should  be  a  teaching  house  and  a  dancing 
house;  a  reading  house  and  a  playing  house;  and  because  it  was 
these,  it  should  be  a  preaching  house,  bidding  the  neighbourhood 
look  for,  strive  for,  and  believe  in  a  better  manhood  and  a  better 
day. 

Mr.   C expressed   whole-hearted   approval,   and   said: 

"Do  you  not  see  that  to  succeed  in  these  radical  changes  you 
must  depute  parts  of  your  work  to  others?  You  must  find 
those  who  agree  with  you  and  who  trust  you;  men  whom  you 
can  trust,  men  willing  to  cooperate  fully.  Now  you  can  count 
on  me  as  such  a  helper.  I  am  with  you  heart  and  soul.  I  have 
now  to  make  to  you  a  proposition.  Hand  over  all  the  musical 
matters  of  the  church  to  my  keeping  and  control;  free  your 
mind  of  them  altogether.  I  will  give  you  the  best  organ,  best 
organist,  and  best  choir  in  New  York,  and  will  meet  all  the 
expenses." 

I  did  not  answer  at  once,  though  of  course  I  saw  that  this 
tempting  scheme  would  not  work.  I  had  not  abolished  my 
musical  committee,  composed  of  old  members  of  the  vestry, 
to  hand  over  the  whole  conduct  of  the  church's  music  to  one 


216  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

man,  however  efficient  and  generous  he  might  be.     Mr.  C 

saw  my  hesitation.  "Wait  a  moment,"  he  said,  "before  you 
reply  to  my  offer."  He  rose  and  went  to  his  desk.  "What 
do  you  think  your  parish  building  would  cost?"  "About 
$200,000."  He  wrote  a  cheque  for  that  amount,  and  pushing 
it  toward  me,  said,  "I  want  to  help  you;  let  me." 

Here  was  my  dream  come  true.  The  old  church  securing 
a  clear-headed  and  most  generous  helper,  and  the  success  of 
my  pet  scheme  assured.  But  it  might  not  be.  If  I  was  to 
surrender  control  of  one  department  of  my  difficult  work  to 
one  man  it  could  only  be  a  matter  of  time  till  other  depart- 
ments would  be  surrendered  also.  I  could  not  hold  my  vestry 
together  if  I  permitted  any  autocracy  other  than  my  own.  I 
never  tried  harder  in  my  life  to  make  my  side  of  a  question 
plain  than  I  did  for  the  next  few  minutes  to  this  good,  head- 
strong, would-be  aid  of  mine,  Mr.  A.  C.  C .     But,  though 

I  did  my  best,  with  sinking  heart  I  knew  I  must  fail.  He  was 
a  very  rich  man;  he  had  had  his  own  way;  he  was  wholly  bent 
on  having  it  now,  and  sooner  or  later  he  and  I  were  bound  to 
disagree.  Then  he  would  leave  me.  Besides  these  general 
considerations,  I  could  not,  I  would  not  give  up  my  large  chancel 
choir  idea,  its  members  recruited  from  the  congregation,  leading 
that  congregation  in  its  worship  because  they  wanted  to  lead  it, 
not  because  they  were  paid.  /  say  I  would  not  give  up  that 
ideal  for  any  quartet  music,  however  good. 

Often  and  often  in  my  Cambridge  days  I  used  to  sit  in  the 
evening  gloom  of  that  wonderful  Henry  VII  chapel  at 
King's  College,  listening  as  the  best  choir  in  the  University  sang 
some  anthem  by  the  masters  of  their  great  art.  And  music 
and  setting  moved  me.  But  when  I  hear  a  congregation  of 
all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men  joining  with  heart  and  soul 
in  such  a  hymn  as  Isaac  Watts'  "Jesus  shall  reign  where'er  the 
sun,"  or  Lyte's  "Abide  with  me,  fast  falls  the  eventide,"  my 
whole  being,  the  best  that  is  within  me,  thrills  to  what  I  must 
believe  is  the  voice  of  God.  Then  new  hopes  are  quickened, 
and  old  resolutions  are  reborn.  That  is  worship.  A  man  can 
give  to  others  only  what  is  given  to  him. 

Congregational  worship  I  was  going  to  work  for  in  St. 
George's.  That  meant  a  spontaneous  congregational  response, 
inspiring  in  its  unison,  whether  in  prayer  or  in  praise.     To  me 


ST.  GEORGE'S,  1883  217 

it  was  too  plain  that  here,  at  the  very  outset,  Mr.  C- 


ideals  and  mine  were  wide  apart.     Mr.  C had  said,  "I 

want  to  help  you;  let  me."  I  replied,  "God  knows  no  clergy- 
man in  New  York  needs  such  help  as  you  can  give  more  than  I 
do,  but  I  cannot  have  you  help  me  in  this  way.  I  cannot  sur- 
render the  direction  of  St.  George's  music  to  you." 

"Then  I  will  never  put  my  foot  inside  your  church  again." 

I  said,  "You  are  doing  wrong,  sir.  You  should  not  have 
offered  me  that  money." 

I  never  saw  Mr.  A.  C.  C again.     He  died  a  few  years 

later. 

I  was  going  to  Jekyll  Island  Club,  in  1889,  for  a  much-needed 
rest.  I  had  been  very  ill.  On  the  little  steamer  that  took  pas- 
sengers from  Brunswick  to  the  Island  I  met  Mr.  F.  B . 

He  was,  I  knew,  head  of  the  great  concern  that  Mr.  A.  C.  C 

had  been  president  of.    When  I  knew  Mr.  C ,  Mr.  B- 


was  his  secretary.     At  the  club  I  got  to  know  Mr.  B pretty 

well,  and  he  told  me  that  Mr.  C often  spoke  kindly  of  St. 

George's  progress  and  of  me.  He  had  told  him  all  about  our 
falling  out,  and  declared  frankly  that  I  had  been  right  and  he 
wrong. 

I  will  depart  a  little  from  the  order  of  events  in  order  to  tell 
the  sequel  of  this  story.  From  earliest  days  I  fell  into  the 
habit  of  breakfasting  once  a  week  with  Mr.  Morgan.     Shortly 

after  my  disaster  with  Mr.  C ,  I  was  at  Mr.  Morgan's 

table,  and  when  breakfast  was  over,  I  told  him  the  whole  story. 
He  listened  carefully  to  all  I  had  to  say,  but,  as  was  his  custom, 
he  said  nothing.  The  parish  building  scheme  he  had  not  heard 
of  before.  Twelve  months  passed,  and  of  it  I  said  no  more  to 
him,  nor  had  he  made  any  reference  to  the  matter.  One  morn- 
ing in  early  spring,  a  shabby  hired  coupe  stopped  at  the  door 
of  the  rectory.  In  it  was  J.  P.  Morgan.  In  those  days  he 
never  drove  in  any  other  vehicle.  He  was  on  his  way  to  the 
steamer;  he  was  sailing  for  Europe  that  day.  "I  have  come 
to  bid  you  good-bye,"  he  said.  Then,  pulling  a  letter  out  of 
his  pocket.  "I  think  this  is  what  you  want,  Rector.  If  I 
have  left  anything  out,  you  can  tell  me  when  I  come  back." 
And  he  was  off. 

On  reading  the  paper,  I  found  that  every  single  detail  of 
what  I  had  said  that  morning  a  year  previous  had  deen  re- 


2i 8  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

membered,  and  was  here  specified  in  this  sketch  of  a  deed  of 
gift.  On  Mr.  Morgan's  return  he  and  I  went  over  the  matter 
again  together,  and  the  result  was  the  following: 

To  the  Rector,  Church  Wardens,  and  Vestrymen  of  St.  George's  Church 

New  York  City: 
Gentlemen: 

On  behalf  of  the  family  of  the  late  Senior  Warden,  Charles  Tracy,  I  wish  to 
communicate  to  you  officially,  their  wish  to  erect  to  his  memory  a  church 
house  to  be  styled,  "The  Memorial  House  of  St.  George's  Church." 

My  proposition  is  this:  that  your  corporation  shall  transfer  to  me,  in  fee 
simple,  the  plot  of  ground  on  East  16th  Street. 

Upon  receiving  from  you  the  deed  of  the  property  mentioned,  I  will  engage 
to  have  erected  upon  the  entire  property  a  church  house,  which  house  shall 
include  an  adequate  chapel  and  Sunday-school  rooms,  rooms  for  the  resident 
clergy,  an  office  for  the  Corporation,  and  rooms  for  the  mission  work  of  the 
parish,  these  latter  to  include  suitable  accommodations  for  the  Boys'  and 
Girls'  Clubs,  Girls'  Friendly  Society,  Helping  Hand,  etc.,  etc.  Also  bath- 
rooms and  a  gymnasium. 

When  completed,  the  property  to  be  deeded,  free  of  debt,  to  the  Rector, 
Church  Wardens,  and  Vestrymen  of  St.  George's  Church,  New  York,  on 
condition  that  they  keep  the  same  in  good  repair,  and  use  the  same  exclu- 
sively for  the  parish  work  in  perpetuity. 

If  this  proposition  meets  your  approval,  I  suggest  that  a  committee,  con- 
sisting of  the  Rector,  the  Wardens,  Mr.  Spencer,  Mr.  Cutting  and  Mr. 
Tracy,  be  appointed,  with  full  power  to  assist  in  carrying  out  the  same. 

Yours  truly, 
J.  Pierpont  Morgan. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

The  Beginnings  of  an  Institutional  Church 

When  shall  we  learn  that  what  attaches  people  to  us  is  the  spirit  we  are  of, 
not  the  machinery  we  employ? — Matthew  Arnold. 

The  $10,000  fund  placed  at  my  disposal  provided  the 
means,  but  where  was  I  to  find  the  men?  For  the  aggressive 
work  I  must  do,  the  ordinary  Divinity  "Theologue"  was  of  no 
use  at  all.  My  greatest  difficulty  was  to  find  clerical  assistance. 
One  good  man  who  had  been  with  me  in  Toronto,  Ralph 
Bridges,  joined  me  soon.  With  his  aid  and  some  temporary 
help  I  kept  things  going  till  I  could  find  the  material  I  wanted; 
but  at  first  this  seemed  impossible. 

The  young  clergy,  or  would-be  clergy,  who  presented  them- 
selves were  plainly  not  of  the  stamp  I  required.  They  were 
fresh  from  the  seminary.  A  man  may  think,  and  a  man  may 
read,  and  a  man  may  toil,  but  he  will  never  know  life  unless  he 
lives;  and  there  the  seminary  gives  him  no  help  at  all. 

To  improve  and  modernize  clerical  education  was  beyond 
me;  but  I  could  do,  or  try  to  do  something  for  my  clergy,  which 
was  not  generally  done  for  clerical  beginners.  If  the  seminaries 
were  largely  responsible  for  their  clerical  inefficiency,  the  re- 
lations that  were  usual  between  rectors  and  assistants  did 
little  or  nothing  to  remedy  a  bad  start.  The  assistant  clergy 
I  had  met  in  my  wanderings  all  over  the  United  States  seemed 
seldom  to  have  taken  any  root  in  the  parishes  where  I  found 
them.  They  did  not  get,  they  did  not  expect  to  get,  much  help 
from  their  superiors.  They  usually  read  the  lessons  and 
prayers  abominably,  and  it  was  but  seldom  indeed  that  any  one 
tried  to  better  either  their  reading  or  their  preaching.  I  had 
known  intimately  a  number  of  able  men,  rectors  in  the  Protes- 
tant Episcopal  Church,  but  so  far  as  I  could  see,  none  of  them 
had  made  much  effort  to  establish  intimate  relations  with 

219 


220  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

assistants.     Some  of  the  most  popular  of  the  clergy  never  took 
the  trouble  to  make  friends  of  their  assistants  at  all. 

My  sympathy  had  gone  out  often  to  those  poor,  ill-trained 
boys  making  a  beginning  in  the  greatest  profession  in  the  world; 
preaching  but  seldom,  and  when  they  did,  feeling  that  the  peo- 
ple they  talked  to  wanted  to  hear  someone  else;  and  even  when 
they  visited,  made  to  feel  that  their  visiting  was  a  bore.  It 
might  be  that  no  system  could  be  suddenly  invented  which 
would  change  these  conditions,  but  so  far  as  they  could  be 
changed  or  modified,  I  determined  to  try  to  do  it  in  my  own 
case. 

To  that  end,  my  clergy  should  live  together  in  a  comfortable, 
well-found  clergy  house.  There  they  should  find  regular  hours 
(which  they  must  keep),  good  housekeeping,  and  good  food.  I 
would  give  them  teaching  and  preaching  work  to  do,  and  would 
make  time  to  attend  the  services  at  which  they  preached.  They, 
their  work,  and  their  preaching  I  would  criticize,  openly  to 
their  faces,  never  behind  their  backs,  and  I  would  make  them 
believe  that  I  welcomed  their  criticism  of  me,  my  plans  and  my 
preaching,  that  I  was  but  a  learner  and  an  experimenter,  as 
they  were,  in  the  great  wide  field  of  human  service.  So  to- 
gether we  would  aim  at  efficiency,  and  strive  hard  to  be  brothers 
in  more  than  name. 

In  outline  this  was  my  plan  for  my  "boys" — so,  as  the 
years  passed,  they  came  to  be  called;  and  so  they  called  them- 
selves. In  all,  thirty-six  men  came  to  me  as  assistant  clergy 
in  twenty-four  years.  And  the  dearest  friends  I  have  to-day 
still  so  sign  their  names  when  they  write  to  me.  What  the  old 
church  came  to  stand  for  and  what  it  accomplished  was 
"my  boys'"  work  as  truly  as  mine.  God  bless  them  and  lead 
them  on  forever! 

There  is  an  old  proverb  my  mother  was  fond  of — I  tried  to 
practise  it  with  my  clergy:  "Patience,  perseverance,  and  sweet 
oil  will  bring  a  snail  to  Jerusalem."  I  believed  in  sweet  oil,  but 
I  tried  not  to  engage  snails. 

Looking  back  on  it  all,  nothing  I  have  accomplished  gives  me 
a  deeper  satisfaction  than  my  association  with  my  assistant 
clergy.  They  were  men  of  very  different  stamps  and  very  dif- 
ferent capacities.  One  was  a  saint,  one  a  genius,  and  only  one 
a  thoroughly  bad  egg  (and  he,  poor  boy,  had  many  gifts);  one 


AN  INSTITUTIONAL  CHURCH  221 

more,  a  brilliant  man,  disappointed  me  and  failed  himself.  But 
the  average  was  high.1  Two  became  bishops  and  one  a  suf- 
fragan bishop,  and  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  would  be 
the  stronger  to-day  if  at  least  five  or  six  more  of  them  had  been 
elected  to  the  Episcopate. 

As  a  venture  of  faith,  I  rented  a  house  on  East  17th  Street, 
that  backed  on  to  our  old  Sunday-school  building  on  East  16th 
Street,  next  the  large  and  commodious  rectory  at  209  East 
1 6th  Street.  Here  I  would  start  my  clerical  family  when  I  had 
gathered  it.  And  now  I  will  tell  how  I  got  the  first  of  my  new 
band — my  Saint.  I  had  a  letter  from  an  English  officer  of  ar- 
tillery stationed  at  Kingston,  Ontario,  whom  I  had  known  when 
I  was  in  Toronto.  "There  was  a  clergyman  in  Kingston," 
he  wrote,  "who  needed  help  from  someone  badly;  brotherly 
help  and  counsel."  Henry  Wilson  was  born  in  Peterborough, 
Canada,  1841.  He  entered  Trinity  College,  Toronto,  where  he 
did  more  than  well,  taking  two  scholarships  and  an  honour 
degree.  In  1883,  he  received  its  D.  D.  Trinity  College  stood 
for  the  High  and  Dry  school  of  Churchmanship,  and  Wilson 
had  been  of  that  party.  He  was  chaplain  to  the  Bishop  of 
Ontario,  and  assistant  to  the  Dean  of  Kingston.  About  the 
time  I  came  to  New  York,  the  Salvation  Army  opened  a  cam- 
paign in  Kingston. 

At  first  Wilson  stood  with  the  Anglican  clergy,  who  to  a 
man  opposed  the  "Army."  After  a  little  it  was  evident  to  him 
that  the  much-scoffed-at  Salvationists  were  reaching  some  of 
his  own  flock  with  whom  he  had  for  years  toiled  in  vain.  Old, 
bibulous  veterans  of  many  years'  army  service  gave  up  whiskey 
and  began  to  pray  and  preach.  Never  was  there  a  man  more 
wholly  given  to  the  service  of  his  flock  than  was  Wilson,  and 
since  the  evidence  of  change  of  heart  in  the  case  of  many  of  his 
own  people  was  inescapable,  he  went  to  the  Salvation  Army 
meetings  and  saw  what  was  going  on — first  silently,  later  re- 
joicingly. Some  of  his  own  people  who  had  been  converted 
called  on  him  to  speak,  and  soon  he  was  preaching  side  by  side 
with  his  newly  found  allies. 

Clerical  bigotry  in  Kingston  was  extreme.  His  clerical 
friends  first  cut  him  then  denounced  him,  and  the  Bishop  for- 
bade his  association  with  the  "Army."     My  correspondent, 

1Charles  Scudding,  Oregon;  E.  C.  Acheson,  suffragan,  Connecticut;  H.  R.  Hulse,  Cuba. 


222  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

who  knew  Wilson  well  and  loved  him,  said  it  was  evident  he 
could  not  stand  the  strain  he  was  under  for  long,  and  if  he 
decided  to  ignore  the  Bishop's  instructions,  he  would  be  "un- 
frocked." 

"His  rector,  the  Dean  of  the  Cathedral  at  Kingston,  had  in- 
sisted on  his  sending  in  his  resignation;  and  when  he  begged 
his  Bishop  to  license  him  as  a  lay  preacher,  and  allow  him  still 
to  work  among  the  poor  and  non-church-going  people  of  the 
diocese,  where  he  had  laboured  for  seventeen  years,  depending 
on  such  offerings  as  they  might  give  for  his  services,  his  request 
was  refused.  Both  the  Bishop  of  Ontario  and  the  Dean  of 
Kingston  finally  clinched  the  matter  by  insisting  'that  he  give 
up  all  connection  with  the  Salvation  Army  and  withdraw  from 
its  grotesque  performances.'  This  Wilson  refused  to  do. 
Could  I  help?" 

I  had  never  met  Wilson,  nor  did  I  know  anything  about 
him  till  I  received  this  letter;  but  the  blind  folly  and  ignor- 
ant cruelty  of  the  thing  moved  me.  I  took  a  leap  in  the 
dark.  I  wrote,  asking  Wilson  to  come  to  me  as  assistant.  It 
was  taking  chances,  but  I  never  did  a  wiser  thing.  When  he 
arrived,  I  saw  that  he  was  a  broken  man.  He  had  left  behind 
him  all  he  knew  and  all  he  loved.  His  whole  ministry  had  been 
spent  in  Kingston,  and  there  his  wife  and  eldest  child  were 
buried.  He  did  not  look  to  me  like  a  man  who  would  do  much 
more  work  anywhere.  That  was  in  1885.  I  will  skip  now 
seventeen  years  in  the  life  story  of  my  friend.  During  those 
years  Kingston  never  saw  him.  First  with  me,  afterward 
with  Doctor  Simpson,  he  went  on  his  way  serving  his  Master 
and  helping  his  fellow-men.  In  1908  (I  was  in  Africa)  they 
brought  back  to  Kingston  all  that  remained  of  Henry  Wilson, 
and  laid  him  beside  his  wife  and  his  little  son.  The  two  ec- 
clesiastics who  had  cast  him  out  were  dead;  new  men  filled 
their  places.  By  his  grave  a  great  crowd  had  gathered,  for 
fifteen  years  had  not  served  to  blight  his  memory,  or  make  the 
people  he  had  loved  and  served  forget  their  friend.  And  the 
new  Dean,  when  he  had  read  the  service,  speaking  not  for  the 
English  church  only  but  for  Kingston  town,  said:  "No  man 
had  ever  left  a  deeper  impress  on  the  spiritual  life  of  this  city." 

I  went  to  meet  my  future  friend,  and  soon  I  saw  that  I  could 
not  start  my  clergy-house  idea  with  him,  for  he  was  evidently 


AN  INSTITUTIONAL  CHURCH  223 

on  the  very  borderland  of  a  serious  nervous  breakdown.  I 
took  him  to  the  rectory,  and  after  consulting  with  my  wife, 
lodged  him  in  a  large  upper  bedroom,  at  the  top  of  the  house. 
I  suggested  his  seeing  a  doctor,  but  here  he  was  adamant.  He 
trusted  his  Master  to  keep  his  body  as  safe  as  his  soul;  and  I 
could  do  nothing  with  him  on  that  score  and  never  did.  I  got 
him  to  compromise  in  the  matter  of  toothache;  after  a  fierce 
siege  of  it  he  was  persuaded  to  go  to  a  dentist.  How  he  dis- 
tinguished in  his  own  mind  between  surgery  and  medicine,  and 
where  he  drew  the  line,  I  never  discovered,  and  indeed,  never 
tried,  for  his  simple  childlike  trust  in  a  God  of  goodness  was  a 
help  often  to  us  all  who  worked  with  him,  and — well,  life  is 
more  than  logic. 

For  some  weeks  my  wife  and  I  were  much  concerned  about 
our  visitor.  At  meal  times  he  did  not  speak,  and  he  spent  his 
time  in  his  room.  While  I  was  naturally  exercised  as  to  the 
balanced  possibilities  and  disabilities  of  saintship  in  Wilson's 
case,  the  man  who  was  to  help  us  both  turned  up  without  in- 
troduction. The  Rev.  Lindsay  Parker  walked  into  my  study 
one  morning  and  at  once  frankly  said  he  wanted  to  be  my 
assistant.  He  said  that  he  was  a  Methodist  minister  in  good 
standing,  but  he  had  decided  to  seek  orders  in  the  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church.  Would  I  help  him?  Parker  captured  me 
from  the  start:  an  Irishman,  traces  of  the  brogue  still  unmis- 
takable, but  such  an  honest  human  soul  as  looked  full  at  me 
out  of  his  wide-opened  blue  eyes! 

If  I  had  taken  a  leap  in  the  dark  in  choosing  Henry  Wilson 
without  seeing  him,  Parker  had  leaped  more  heedlessly  than  I, 
for  he  had  already  withdrawn  from  the  Methodist  body  with- 
out having  any  idea  of  the  grave  difficulties  Episcopal  legalists 
had  ingeniously  pieced  together  to  hedge  the  door  of  access  to 
orders  in  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church.  Doing  so,  our 
church,  of  course,  was  only  following  indisputable  Scriptural 
precedent.  Had  she  not  the  very  highest  authority  for  in- 
sisting on  the  "narrow  door"?  Surely  she  had.  So  let  other 
"religious  bodies"  (let  no  man  confuse  them  with  The  Church) 
do  as  they  would.  She,  at  least,  would  keep  her  door  of  en- 
trance strait  and  narrow — so  strait  and  narrow  that  she  al- 
ways let  in  the  little  man,  and  usually  kept  the  big  out. 

Lindsay  Parker  promised  to  be  too  big  a  man  to  push  through 


224  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

that  door,  or,  to  put  the  matter  plainly,  I  could  see  small 
chance  of  my  getting  him  into  Deacon's  orders  soon  enough  to 
enable  him  to  be  of  practical  use  to  me.  Over  the  pros  and 
cons  we  went  together.  He  had  a  wife  and  children,  no  money, 
no  home,  no  scholarship,  worst  of  all  no  Greek.  Then  came  to 
me  a  happy  thought.  There  in  my  rectory  sat  Henry  Wilson, 
a  first-class  Greek  scholar;  silent,  plunged  in  a  deep  melancholy. 
I  went  upstairs  and  took  Parker  with  me,  and  left  the  two  men 
together. 

I  wish  I  could  do  justice,  or  anything  like  justice,  to  the  com- 
pelling qualities  of  Lindsay  Parker's  charm  and  bonhommie, 
allied  to  an  unusually  keen  wit.  He  was  a  second-rate  preacher, 
but  one  of  the  best  story  tellers,  and  that  in  many  dialects, 
I  ever  met.  Transparently  honest,  full  of  sympathy,  but  ex- 
ceedingly wise  and  shrewd  in  his  judgments  of  people,  rich 
or  poor;  the  life  of  the  dinner  table  or  the  club  meeting;  always 
understanding  young  human  nature,  and  by  it  understood.  He 
saw  the  humorous  side  of  everything,  and  his  jokes  and  stories 
would  draw  laughter  from  a  stone.  Loving  and  loyal  to  me 
and  to  all  his  friends,  he  brought  sunshine  and  courage  with 
him  wherever  he  went.  Who  could  have  foreseen  that  one 
who  lived  "abundantly,"  if  ever  a  man  did,  should  be  doomed 
to  sink  for  long  years  into  a  far  more  hopeless  melancholy  than 
that  out  of  which  he  rescued  his  dearest  friend?  Yet  such  was 
nature's  cruel  decree. 

The  two  men  spent  the  morning  together,  and  Parker  had  his 
first  lesson  in  New  Testament  Greek,  and  Henry  Wilson  had 
found  work  for  which  he  was  well  fitted.  Great  days  those  first 
days  together  were !  By  extraordinary  good  fortune  I  had  got 
the  men  I  needed  to  help  me  in  laying  the  foundation  I  re- 
quired. Each  had  his  own  work,  loved  it  and  succeeded  in  it. 
My  vestry  was  an  unfailing  support.  Every  corner  in  our  in- 
sufficient old  Sunday-school  building  was  filling  up  with  young 
people.  On  Sunday  it  was  crammed.  I  took  my  first  men's 
confirmation  class  in  the  laundry  of  the  rectory.  The  great, 
dark  basement  of  the  church  was  turned  into  a  bowling  alley. 
At  this,  some  of  my  "best"  were  rather  concerned,  but  the 
spirit  of  the  congregation  was  well  expressed  by  one  of  Mr. 
Schieflfelin's  staff  of  ushers  when  one  Sunday  morning  he  was 
questioned  by  a  newspaper  reporter.     The  reporter,  coming 


AN  INSTITUTIONAL  CHURCH  225 

early,  was  shown  to  a  seat  high  up  in  the  church.  He  noticed 
that  that  morning  Mr.  Morgan  had  some  difficulty  in  getting 
any  seat  at  all.  When  the  service  was  over,  the  reporter  but- 
tonholed the  usher  and  said:  "How  do  the  old  St.  George's 
people,  like  Mr.  Morgan  there,  stand  this  sort  of  thing?"  "Oh," 
said  the  usher,  "most  of  the  old  stand-bys  have  gone  away  long 
ago,  and  those  that  remain  will  stand  anything." 

I  am  not  going  to  weary  the  readers  of  my  story  with  long 
quotations  from  my  year  books  of  early  or  later  days,  or  with 
a  history  of  the  things  I  aimed  to  do  and  failed  to  do;  or  of 
those  I  succeeded  in  doing.  But  briefly  I  must  outline  what 
was  my  aim  when  I  began  my  work  in  East  Side  New  York.  I 
do  this  the  more  readily  because  if  I  were  a  young  man  to-day 
beginning  all  over  again  (and  I  wish  I  were),  I  should  follow 
the  same  policy,  though  naturally  I  should  not  always  employ 
the  same  machinery. 

The  business  of  the  Christian  Church  is  to  lead  men  on 
and  up.  A  God  all  men  can  believe  in  is  a  God  resident  in 
man  himself.  If  that  is  so,  man's  first  duty  is  to  help  his 
brother-man  to  betterment;  and  that  again  means  that  the 
Christian  Church,  which  is  composed  of  men  believing  in  and 
standing  for  what  Jesus  stood  for,  must  ever  be  engaged  in  any 
and  every  effort  to  help  men  to  rise  into  fellowship  with  the 
Great  Master  Helper  and  Saviour  of  us  all. 

Putting  this  philosophy  of  the  Christian  endeavour  into 
concrete  shape  amounts  to  this:  the  Church  of  Jesus  should 
show  the  way  to  all  sorts  of  betterment.  She  cannot  do  the 
doctor's  work,  or  the  policeman's,  or  the  teacher's,  or  the 
mayor's;  but  she  can  and  should  not  only  protest  when  these 
agencies  fail  in  their  manifest  duty;  but  further,  she  must  stand 
ready  to  illustrate  concretely,  even  in  a  small  way,  what  should 
and  could  be  accomplished  for  good  under  the  circumstances 
confronting  her.  That  having  been  done,  then  let  her  step  out 
from  under,  and  let  her  take  up  some  new  need,  some  new  re- 
form. If  she  persists  in  saying  that  religion  only  (in  its  narrow 
sense)  is  her  business,  men  of  sense  and  sympathy  will  leave 
her;  or,  if  they  do  not  leave,  will  occupy  themselves  less  and 
less  with  what  she  is  or  claims  to  be.  This  is  what  with  half 
an  eye  any  one  can  see  is  happening  to  her  to-day.  To  her, 
children  are  brought  for  baptism;  men  and  women  kneel  to  be 


226  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

married;  and  when  death  comes,  crowds  who  have  rarely  visited 
her  courts  are  present  to  express  their  respectful  regard  for  the 
bereaved,  and  their  sense  of  a  common  loss.  She  gracefully 
and  most  fittingly  blesses  life's  beginnings,  and  most  eloquently 
would  solace  those  facing  its  inevitable  close.  And  there  her 
chief  function  for  these  multitudes  ends.  Their  names  appear 
on  some  church  roll,  but  in  no  real  sense  are  they  of  her. 

There  was  a  time,  and  not  so  long  ago,  when  what  the  Church 
said  in  council  had  immense  weight  with  men.  Who  pays 
attention  to-day  to  the  wordy  reports  of  even  a  Lambeth  con- 
ference, where,  gathered  from  all  over  the  world,  two  hundred 
and  seventy-two  bishops  met  for  weeks,  to  discuss  behind  closed 
doors  what  are  the  present  duties  of  the  Christian  Church?  So 
long  as  the  bishops  confine  themselves  to  religious  generalities, 
their  pronouncements  are  in  accord  with  the  desires  and  hopes 
of  good  people  everywhere.  But  this  is  only  true  of  them  so 
far  as  they  deal  in  generalities.  When  it  comes  to  speaking 
plainly  on  specific  ills;  to  advising  courses  of  action  to  be 
pursued,  approving  some,  and  singling  out  others  for  blames — 
then  it  is  startlingly  evident  that  these  Right  Reverend  Fathers 
in  God  are  floundering  in  uncertain  paths;  in  fact,  do  not  know 
what  they  are  talking  about;  and  are  quite  unfit  to  act  as  guides 
to  society. 

One  stands  aghast  at  a  group  of  bishops  venturing,  as  the 
specially  accredited  messengers  of  God,  to  declare  that  since 
syphilis,  the  most  terrible  physical  curse  known  to  man,  may 
be  the  result  of  individual  sin,  therefore  all  prophylactic  precau- 
tions taken  against  it,  even  when  such  were  taken  by  medical 
service  of  the  Army  and  Navy,  must  be  condemned  as  mani- 
festly opposed  to  the  will  of  a  holy  and  merciful  God.1 

Think  of  it!  This  is  Episcopacy's  ultimatum  to  doctors, 
chaplains,  and  officers,  servants  of  their  fellows,  facing  for  them- 
selves and  for  the  youth  of  all  lands  such  conditions  of  prolonged 
nerve  rack  and  horror  as  never  have  mortal  men  faced  before. 

When  I  showed  the  report  to  an  eminent  physician,  a  friend  of 
mine,  he  said:  "Is  it  any  wonder  that  few  intelligent  men  can 
find  time  to  go  and  hear  such  clergy  preach?" 

The  committee  was  composed  of  thirty-six  bishops,  their 
Sees  scattered  all  over  the  world.     Doctor  Ingram,  Bishop  of 

'See  paragraph  69  of  Lambeth  Conference  report. 


AN  INSTITUTIONAL  CHURCH  227 

London,  was  chairman,  and  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church 
was  represented  on  that  committee  by  the  Bishops  of  Duluth, 
Kansas,  Texas,  and  Vermont.1 

I  will  tell  a  story  about  Bishop  Ingram,  illustrating  the  un- 
fitness of  that  saintly  man  for  the  chairmanship  of  so  vitally 
important  a  committee.  I  cannot  go  further  into  the  matter 
here.  But  the  report  of  that  committee  on  the  sex  relation  of 
man  and  wife  was  silly,  impracticable,  and  untrue.  Every 
sensible  man  knows  the  report  is  nonsense,  but  so  far  as  I  have 
seen  none  of  the  church  papers  have  said  one  word  of  criticism. 
Ingram  was  a  close  personal  friend  of  my  youngest  brother, 
Rev.  Marcus  Rainsford,  Jr.,  Rector  of  Paddington,  London, 
who  himself  told  the  story  to  me.  Marcus  was,  like  his  father, 
an  Evangelical,  and  his  was  one  of  the  very  few  appoint- 
ments made  by  the  Bishop  of  London  from  the  Evangelical 
party. 

In  my  brother's  parish  was  a  nice  boy,  son  of  one  of  the 
prominent  members  of  the  church.  He  married  the  daughter 
of  an  excellent  citizen,  living  close  to  my  brother's  rectory, 
who  belonged  to  an  old  Unitarian  family.  My  brother  married 
the  young  couple,  and  they  went  to  Switzerland  for  their  honey- 
moon. Sunday  fell  two  or  three  days  after  the  wedding.  On 
Sunday  morning  the  young  couple  went  to  church.  It  was  the 
first  Sunday  in  the  month,  and,  said  the  bridegroom  to  his 
bride,  "Let  us  take  the  Holy  Communion  together."  At  the 
church  door  was  posted  a  notice  that  the  Bishop  of  London 
would  preach  that  Sunday. 

"Oh,"  said  the  boy,  "I  know  him.  He  is  a  friend  of  our 
rector.  I  will  introduce  you  to  him."  They  went  into  the 
vestry  and  were  cordially  received.  "  Bishop,  we  were  married 
on  Wednesday,  and  we  would  like  at  the  beginning  of  our  mar- 
ried life  to  take  the  Holy  Communion  together." 

The  Bishop  was  most  cordial.  "Whose  daughter  are  you, 
my  dear?" 

The  bride  named  her  father. 

"But  your  father's  family  are  Unitarians.  When  were  you 
confirmed?" 

"  Bishop,  I  have  not  been  confirmed,  but  I  want  to  join  my 
husband's  church,  of  course,  and  I  would  like  to  take  the  Holy 

^e  Lambeth  Conference,  1920,  pages  1 1 1—112,  MacMillan  &  Co. 


228  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Communion  with  him,  on  our  first  Sunday  together  as  man  and 
wife." 

Bishop  Ingram  was  adamant,  and  refused  then  and  there  to 
give  that  young  thing  the  Sacrament. 

That  is  what  Bishop  Ingram  did,  and  I  say  his  action  comes 
near  being  a  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost. 

There  you  have  the  incorrigible  spiritual  stupidity  of  An- 
glicanism at  its  worst!  And  such  was  the  man  named  by 
Bishop  Davidson,  Archbishop  of  Canterbury,  to  preside  over 
and  direct  the  councils  of  a  committee  whose  findings  must  go 
forth  to  the  whole  world  as  the  last  word  of  wisdom  and  direc- 
tion that  that  great  Communion  has  to  give  on  matters  so 
vitally  important  to  our  race  as  the  relations  of  the  sexes. 

But  I  must  get  back  to  my  East  Side  people  and  tell  what 
applications  of  the  theory  I  have  outlined  I  was  to  try  to  put  in 
practice. 

(i)  First,  if  I  would  reach  the  neighbourhood,  I  must  win 
the  children.  Neglect  of  child-life  in  the  city  at  that  time  was 
woeful.     The  public  schools  were  bad. 

The  Roman  Catholic  Church  largely  controlled  appoint- 
ments of  teachers.  There  was  no  provision  whatever  in  the 
schools  for  the  very  little  children.  There  was  not  one  single 
kindergarten  in  connection  with  the  city  schools  of  New  York. 
This  is  hardly  believable,  but  it  is  the  truth. 

(2)  Auchmulty's  fine  industrial  school  was  doing  good  work, 
but  it  stood  alone.  Boys  and  girls  in  our  public  schools  had 
nothing  offered  to  them  but  books.  There  was  no  teaching 
for  the  hand  or  eye,  so  I  would  start  an  industrial  school  for 
my  boys.  In  this,  and  in  many  other  schemes  dear  to  my  heart, 
the  kindly  and  trustful  help  of  my  warden,  J.  P.  Morgan,  was 
given  me.  I  laid  my  plans  before  him,  and  he  gave  me  $6,000 
a  year  for  many  years,  and  more  when  I  needed  it  for  St. 
George's  Industrial  School.  It  had  quite  a  history,  and  I 
shall  speak  of  it  later. 

One  other  practical  reason  I  had  for  that  school.  From  my 
entrance  on  work  in  the  East  Side  I  tried  to  come  into  touch 
with  the  labour  unions,  and  here  I  found  the  strange  obsession, 
that  to  promote  the  well-being  of  the  labouring  man  it  was 
necessary  to  put  limits  to  his  education.  In  brief,  I  was 
pressed  into  starting  my  school  by  the  discovery  that  it  was 


AN  INSTITUTIONAL  CHURCH  229 

most  difficult,  sometimes  impossible,  to  find  places  for  likely 
lads  who  wanted  to  learn  a  trade.  They  could  only  learn  it  by 
becoming  apprentices,  and  the  unions  of  each  trade  rigorously 
cut  down  the  number  of  apprentices  permitted. 

(3)  Then  I  saw  children  and  growing  boys  in  the  schools 
given  nothing  or  next  to  nothing  in  the  way  of  exercise.  I 
went  to  the  schools  and  looked  around  for  myself.  What  I 
saw  was  tragically  absurd.  A  few  minutes'  recreation  was  due 
in  one  school  I  visited  more  than  once.  I  waited  to  see  it 
taken,  and  what  I  saw  was  over  one  hundred  boys,  from  eight 
to  sixteen,  lined  up  in  silence,  their  toes  touching  a  chalk  line. 
In  the  next  room  joyous  jabber  broke  out  of  a  sudden. 

"What  is  going  on  there?" 

"Oh,  that  is  the  girls'  room." 

"Are  they  toeing  a  chalk  line?" 

"Oh,  no;  they  are  good;  we  let  them  play.  But  these  boys 
are  an  unruly  lot." 

This  was  said  before  the  poor,  mute,  unruly  lot.  Some  of  those 
outraged  boys  looked  their  unspoken  protest  to  me,  and  I 
think  they  saw  that  I  understood  the  wrong  done  them.  Said 
I  to  myself,  "My  boys  shall  have  a  good  gymnasium."  Oh, 
the  wrongs  done  the  children  still  are  many,  but  we  have 
"marched,"  as  the  French  say,  since  those  days  of  corrupt 
folly. 

(4)  I  never  had  forgotten  my  own  first,  lonely,  dreadfully 
hot  summer  in  New  York,  in  1876.  Not  one  holiday  in  it  for 
me  during  the  torrid  period!  And  I  made  my  plans  to  do 
what  could  be  done  for  the  children  during  the  heat.  I  could 
send  them  to  the  sea;  a  car-load  at  first,  later  two  car-loads 
every  day  during  school  vacations.  To  get  this  going  I  went 
to  my  ladies  and  they  helped  me  splendidly.  To-day  children 
can  go  to  the  country  and  dabble  in  the  sea.  A  hundred  or- 
ganizations are  busily  at  work  making  it  possible.  It  was  not 
so  in  1883.  I  had  secured  the  efficient  assistance  of  the  Rev. 
E.  F.  Miles,  M.  D.,  and  Mrs.  Miles,  and  to  these  competent 
people  I  turned  over  our  seaside  work. 

The  first  excursion  to  Rockaway  Beach  was  on  June  4,  1883, 
and  every  week  after  that  till  September  4th  a  special  car 
went  down  loaded  with  children  and  their  parents.  Many  of 
those  little  ones  had  never  seen  the  sea.    This  was  about  the 


230  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

first  thing  I  did  in  New  York.  I  am  proud  of  the  date  of  our 
beginning.  Nothing  was  settled  in  the  old  church  then.  The 
galleries  were  not  yet  opened,  nor  the  changes  our  new  musical 
arrangements  called  for  made.  I  knew  well  that  if  we  could 
but  win  the  children  we  would  have  the  parents,  too.  And  that 
first  summer  (and  it  was  a  hot  one)  we  went  for  the  children 
of  the  neighbourhood  and  laid  the  foundations  of  lasting 
friendship  with  hosts  of  them. 

Besides  the  daily  excursions,  we  took  two  hundred  sickly 
children  and  their  mothers  to  the  sea  and  kept  them  there  for 
a  week  or  more.  By  these  four  ways  of  approach  I  would 
reach  the  young.  I  would  get  on  understandable  terms  with 
them  and  their  parents — outside  the  church  first — my  expecta- 
tion being  that  later  they  would  of  their  own  will  seek  a  place 
inside  it.     I  was  not  disappointed. 

Thus  it  was  that  during  the  first  few  months  of  my  rectorship 
I  laid  the  foundations  for  a  new  kind  of  church,  the  Institu- 
tional Church.  As  time  went  on  it  was  copied,  and  sometimes 
misrepresented  and  misunderstood;  but  I  believed  then  and 
believe  still  that  both  in  cities  and  in  country  it  must  super- 
sede the  older  form  of  religious  organization.  This  latter  dealt 
with  the  family,  provided  for  the  family,  had  its  family  pew, 
and  depended  on  patriarchal  family  ideas.  Those  ideas 
worked  well  in  their  time,  but  that  time  is  not  our  time.  The 
sort  of  church  I  was  striving  for  should  appeal  to  the  com- 
munity as  well  as  to  the  family.  It  should  do  this  not  by  pulpit 
denouncement  of  evil  things  only,  but  by  demonstration  of  a 
better  way,  even  if  the  demonstration  had  to  be  but  a  small 
affair. 

To  sum  up:    My  Institutional  Church  should 

(i)     Select  its  points  of  attack  and  education  wisely. 

(2)  Be  positive,  not  merely  negative;  not  only  attack  an 
evil  thing,  but  illustrate  a  good  thing. 

(3)  Do  this  so  as  to  educate  the  community,  not  merely 
to  fill  the  church;  and,  most  important,  as  soon  as  this  has  been 
accomplished,  get  from  under. 

I  would  insist  on  this  last  point.  Here  it  is  that,  in  nine 
cases  out  of  ten,  churches  all  over  the  land  fail. 

Hospitals  are  founded,  schools  established,  dispensaries 
opened,  libraries  and  a  hundred  other  excellent  and  necessary 


AN  INSTITUTIONAL  CHURCH  231 

institutions  offered  to  the  public;  and  year  in  and  year  out, 
the  patient  souls  that  gave  money  to  found  them  are  pestered 
to  support  them,  while  the  fact  is,  they  should  not  be  sup- 
ported; they  should  be  scrapped,  or  handed  over  to  lay  organ- 
ization, municipal  or  state. 

The  quotation  from  Matthew  Arnold  with  which  I  headed 
this  chapter  finely  stresses  the  principle  I  wish  to  insist  on  here. 
You  can  help  your  fellows  to  better  living  in  many  ways,  but 
it  is  the  spirit  of  sympathy,  understanding,  and  love  in  which 
you  go  about  it,  and  in  which  all  your  reforms  are  adminis- 
tered, that  can  alone  make  them  successful.  Real  religion  is 
not  too  common  on  the  highway  of  life.  Yet  those  who  tread 
it  are  very  really  hungry  for  real  religion,  and  quickly  recog- 
nize the  real  thing — and  also  quickly  resent  any  substitute 
offered  for  it. 

From  our  beginning  my  bishop,  Henry  C.  Potter,  gave  me  his 
invaluable  counsel.  None  knew  our  problems  better,  and 
none  helped  more  to  solve  them.  He  saw  what  we  were  trying 
to  do.  I  tried  him  sometimes  sorely,  I  fear.  Sometimes  I 
frankly  differed  from  him.  More  than  once  he  saved  me  from 
annoyance  by  quietly  pigeonholing  the  communications  ad- 
dressed to  him  as  head  of  the  diocese,  by  good  people  who  re- 
sented things  I  said  or  did.  He  sent  a  valuable  parcel  of  the 
newest  books  to  me  when  for  a  year  I  was  in  the  wilds  of 
Africa.  I  wish  I  had  not  lost  the  note  that  accompanied  his 
gift.  Ever  and  always  he  was  my  dear  friend  and  wise  coun- 
sellor— and  if  he  had  lived  I  certainly  should  not  have  resigned 
my  orders. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
Avenue  A — Work  Among  the  Young 

A  great  drought  afflicted  the  land  of  Israel.  The  heavens  were  as 
brass ,  the  earth  as  iron.  Water  dried  up  at  the  fountains  and  cattle 
dropped  in  the  stall.  The  King  called  his  people  together,  so  that  the 
nation  should  beseech  the  Lord  to  send  rain  upon  the  earth.  Then  the 
King  stood  forth  and  made  his  prayer,  but  the  sky  was  as  brass  and  the 
earth  as  iron.  The  priests  of  the  temple  made  their  prayer,  but  the  sky 
was  as  brass  and  the  earth  as  iron.  And  the  lords  and  great  men,  the 
wise  men  and  chief  captains,  made  their  prayer,  yet  still  the  sky  was  as 
brass  and  the  earth  as  iron. 

Then  there  stood  forth  an  old  man,  poor  and  in  mean  clothing,  and 
he  made  his  prayer,  and  lol  the  sky  was  black  with  clouds,  and  there 
was  a  sound  of  abundance  of  rain. 

Then  the  King  and  his  counsellors  and  his  captains,  the  priests  and 
the  wise  men  gathered  round  that  poor  old  man,  saying:  "And  who  are 
you  whose  prayer  has  availed  with  Jehovah,  to  send  rain  in  the  earth  ?  " 
And  he  said,  "I  am  a  teacher  of  little  children." — Talmud. 

The  shaping  of  my  work  in  New  York  City,  whatever  was 
of  value  in  it,  took  final  form  from  the  foundations  I  laid  at  its 
very  beginning.  I  must  therefore  ask  indulgence  if  I  write  at 
some  length  of  our  earliest  beginnings,  and  our  plannings  to 
win  to  our  church  those  who  had  never  entered  any  church,  or 
for  long  had  lapsed  from  church  attendance;  and  if  I  dwell  on 
the  work  done  by  those  dear  fellow-soldiers,  both  clerical  and 
lay,  whose  loyal  aid  never  failed  me  while  I  was  their  leader. 

I  do  not  think  it  would  be  easy  in  any  church  to  find  three 
men  more  profoundly  unlike  than  were  Wilson,  Parker,  and  I. 
Nor  do  I  think  it  would  be  easy  to  find  three  who  so  completely 
understood  and  trusted  each  other,  or  who  worked  better  to- 
gether. To  get  Parker  through  his  examination  for  deacon's 
orders  gave  Wilson  all  he  could  do,  even  when  our  understand- 
ing bishop  lent  his  all-powerful  help.  It  was  altogether  de- 
lightful to  me  to  see  the  way  in  which  my  dear  saint's  melan- 
choly  quickly  disappeared,   as   fog   before  sunlight.     Parker 

,232 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  233 

gave  Wilson  something  to  do  that  was  worth  doing,  and  the 
close,  warm  friendship  that  sprang  up  between  the  men  was 
a  great  good  thing  for  them  both.  Each  had  an  unusually 
keen  sense  of  humour,  and  each  admired  in  the  other  what  he 
knew  himself  to  lack. 

There  is  fascination  in  adventuring  into  a  new  field!  This 
fascination  I  think  we  all  three  keenly  felt.  Each  of  us  had  in 
that  field  to  find  his  own  special  work  and  go  about  it  in  his  own 
way.  I  always  left  to  my  assistants  large  liberty  in  this,  and 
the  test  of  my  policy  came  when  we  went  to  work  collecting 
the  first  confirmation  classes.  I  took  the  men's  class,  depend- 
ing on  my  preaching  and  visiting  to  reach  them.  Parker 
asked  to  be  allowed  to  gather  a  class  of  his  own,  and  in  his  own 
way.  And  Wilson,  who  adored  little  children,  who  understood 
them  and  was  understood  by  them,  had  the  youngest  class. 

I  shall  never  forget  what  that  first  presentation  to  our  bishop 
of  the  fruits  of  our  opening  work  meant  to  me.  We  were  real 
fishermen;  we  had  to  go  out  and  find  and  catch  our  fish.  There 
were  by  now  very  few  old  affiliated  families  on  whose  youth  we 
might  count  to  make  up  our  classes.  There  were  not  more  than 
twenty  such  when  I  became  rector,  and  several  of  these  had 
sought  a  more  peaceful  ecclesiastical  atmosphere  than  St. 
George's  afforded  them. 

At  the  very  outset  Lindsay  Parker  showed  his  quality.  He 
elected  to  canvass  the  great  stores  that  were  then  springing  up 
near  Union  Square.  At  meal  hours  he  went  through  them  day 
after  day.  In  a  little  while  there  was  not  a  floorwalker  and 
scarcely  a  sales-lady  that  did  not  know  and  welcome  him. 
Sixty-five  such  young  people,  men  and  women,  all  or  nearly 
all  over  twenty  years  of  age,  my  as  yet  unordained  deacon 
Lindsay  Parker  prepared  and  presented  to  the  Bishop  for  con- 
firmation. And  his  was  the  strongest  part  of  an  extraordinar- 
ily strong  class. 

So  far  I  have  been  telling  chiefly  of  our  plans  for  reaching  the 
young.  I  have  had  a  purpose  in  doing  this.  My  conviction 
was  then  and  is  still  that  the  true  way  to  build  firmly  is  to  reach 
the  young.  If  you  win  them,  the  future  is  yours.  If  you  fail 
to  get  them,  then  you  face  certain  ultimate  defeat,  no  matter 
how  many  signs  of  temporary  prosperity  may  attend  you.  I 
shall  have  more  to  say  on  this  point  later,  but  it  was  evident 


234  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

that  we  must  invent  some  way  of  reaching  the  unchurched 
adult  on  the  East  Side,  as  well  as  the  young  people,  and  of  our 
earliest  efforts  in  this  direction  I  must  now  give  an  outline. 

I  had  a  notice  board  fixed  to  the  stone  pillars  of  the  church 
porch.  It  read:  "Come  in,  rest  and  pray."  Many  such  can 
be  seen  in  New  York  now.  Ours  was  the  first  and  it  did  steady 
work,  that  notice  board!  It  spoke  to  the  passer-by  of  what 
the  church  stood  for. 

One  Sunday  morning  after  service  I  noticed  a  gentleman 
and  a  lady  waiting  till  others  had  gone,  evidently  wishing  to 
speak  to  me  alone.  "I  have  come  here  to  discharge  a  debt, 
sir,"  said  the  man.  "  I  was  a  physician  in  Brooklyn,  doing  well 
in  my  profession  and  happily  married.  Looking  back,  I  cannot 
see  any  reason  why  we  did  not  continue  to  be  happy,  but  med- 
dling friends  interfered,  we  drew  apart,  and  to  my  shame  I 
confess  I  began  to  drink.  As  I  drank  more  and  more  we  drew 
further  apart.  I  began  to  lose  my  practice.  My  wife  left  me, 
and  to  make  a  long  story  short,  in  a  couple  of  years  I  had  no 
home  and  no  practice.  I  was  a  lonely  man  on  the  way  to  the 
pit,  and  going  there  as  fast  as  I  could  go. 

"One  hot  day  in  July  I  was  wandering  about  this  part  of  the 
city  and  I  saw  a  notice  outside  this  church  which  I  had  never 
seen  on  any  other  church.  'Come  in,  rest  and  pray.'  I  went 
in  and  threw  myself  on  my  knees.  I  had  not  prayed  for  years. 
I  reviewed  my  life.  I  knew  my  wife  was  a  good  woman;  I 
knew  I  still  loved  her;  I  believed  she  loved  me;  I  saw  no  reason 
why  I  should  be  beaten.  I  prayed  for  strength  and  I  got  it. 
I  sought  my  wife.  I  regained  my  friends  and  my  professional 
position.  I  owe  it  all  to  your  open  church  and  to  your  call, 
'Come  in,  rest  and  pray.'  Let  me  introduce  you,  sir,  to  my 
wife." 

The  church  did  not  stand  on  a  thoroughfare.  For  what  we 
were  attempting  it  was  not  well-placed,  for  it  faced  a  quiet 
square  and  no  great  thoroughfare  ran  near  us.  But  into  the 
square  came  some  of  the  drifting  element  of  the  East  Side,  some 
"  bums,"  some  tired  and  disheartened  folk,  and  they  read  our 
sign,  and  sometimes  came  in.  They  soiled  a  few  cushions,  they 
stole  a  few  church  books,  but  they  were  never  shown  the  door. 
Of  course  they  did  not  come  to  the  church  services.  Such 
beaten  folk  had  got  too  far  from  any  church  for  that.     But 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  235 

some  of  them  began  to  show  interest  in  us — and  on  a  cold  day, 
to  a  badly  clothed  man,  it  was  a  pleasant  place.  On  Sundays 
I  stood  at  the  church  door  till  a  few  minutes  before  the  services 
opened.  I  also  got  back  to  the  door  as  soon  after  the  blessing 
was  given  as  I  could. 

In  August,  1884, 1  rented,  at  $5  a  day,  a  large  room  back  of  a 
saloon  at  253  Avenue  A,  between  15th  and  16th  streets.  I 
persuaded  some  of  the  small  local  storekeepers  to  display 
placards  I  had  printed  asking  the  neighbours  to  come  to  a  reli- 
gious service  on  Sunday  afternoon.  The  only  entrance  was 
through  the  saloon,  where,  in  spite  of  the  Sunday  closing  law, 
an  active  trade  in  drinks  of  many  sorts,  all  of  them  strong,  was 
always  going  on,  and  a  rough  crowd  was  smoking  and  playing 
billiards  and  cards.  A  questionable  environment  it  seemed 
for  a  "baby  mission,"  but  the  thing  in  its  favour  that  decided 
me  was  that  there  was  no  stand-offishness  about  it.  Here  was 
a  meeting  place  of  the  people  I  was  after,  a  meeting  place  of 
their  own  choosing  and  making,  not  one  that  the  church  made 
and  thrust  on  them.  I  had  walked  many,  many  miles  in  those 
dirty  swarming  streets  (where  women  and  children  hung  in 
midsummer  out  of  windows  and  doors  in  a  way  that  made  you 
think  they  were  pushed  out  from  inside),  looking  for  a  place,  be- 
fore I  found  what  I  wanted.     No.  253  Avenue  A  suited  me  well. 

Since  that  beginning  in  the  little  Baptist  chapel  in  Bethnal 
Green  almost  twenty  years  before,  I  had  made  a  good  many 
experiments  in  the  missionary  field,  but  as  I  made  my  way,  that 
hot  August  afternoon,  to  the  saloon  in  Avenue  A,  I  felt  I  was  on 
ground  absolutely  unknown  to  me.  Of  what  was  going  to  hap- 
pen I  had  no  idea  whatever.  I  took  neither  of  my  assistant 
clergy.  Parker  was  too  fat,  and  Wilson  was  as  preeminently 
committed  to  non-resistance  as  I  was  not.  I  took  only  two  or 
three  volunteer  workers,  men  all.  Bryant  Lindley  was  one  of 
them,  I  remember,  and  I  had  more  than  a  suspicion  that  as  he 
belonged  to  the  church  militant  he  came  because  he  had  an 
inkling  we  would  be  in  for  a  scrap.  No  one  could  foretell  what 
audience  we  would  get  or  if  we  would  get  any.  A  friendly 
policeman  begged  me  to  take  a  cop,  but  I  had  thought  that 
over  before  choosing  our  ground,  and  had  decided  that  if  I 
could  not  carry  on  this  work  without  the  aid  of  a  policeman  I'd 
give  up  and  try  something  else. 


236  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

I  found  the  room  almost  full  of  children  and  rough  boys, 
a  few  poor  women,  and  no  men  except  those  whose  heads  were 
occasionally  thrust  through  the  door  dividing  us  from  the 
saloon,  and  who  were  evidently  interested  only  in  what  a  figure 
these  new  adventurers  into  the  tenement  region  would  cut.  A 
babel  of  voices  greeted  our  entering.  The  boys  were  on  their 
feet,  rushing  after  each  other  all  round  the  places — a  regular 
"  follow-my-leader "  scramble.  The  girls  were  there  too  for  a 
lark,  and  took  their  fair  share  in  raising  a  row.  It  was  a  youth- 
ful but  an  exceedingly  tough  looking  crowd. 

I  called  them  to  order  and  tried  to  speak.  This  brought 
things  to  an  immediate  crisis.  Those  boys  formed  a  flying 
wedge.  It  was  well  and  promptly  done,  and  I  was  knocked  flat 
on  the  floor.  It  was  all  play,  rough  play — no  viciousness  in 
it,  but  play  with  a  definite  purpose.  They  knew  the  purpose; 
so  did  I.  It  was  to  decide  who  was  the  master  in  that  room, 
and  certainly  they  won  the  first  round.  When  I  got  up  from 
the  floor  we  had  a  lively  time  of  it,  singling  out  the  leaders  and 
getting  them  outside. 

As  you  can  imagine,  after  this  beginning  the  rest  of  the  pro- 
ceedings were  somewhat  disturbed.  When  we  had  locked  up 
the  room  and  turned  homeward  the  neighbourhood  gave  us 
another  taste  of  its  quality.  I  had  hardly  reached  the  street 
when  I  found  that  behind  me  quite  a  procession  of  youngsters 
had  formed.  They  fell  into  line  and  where  I  went  they  went, 
joining  in  a  sort  of  chant  as  they  marched  which  ran:  "Won't 
he  be  a  comfort  to  his  mummy  when  he's  grown  up?" 

That  first  hot  afternoon  taught  me  afresh  a  lesson  I  was 
prepared  to  learn.  To  the  young  I  must  look  for  my  allies. 
'Tis  they  who  are  ready  to  follow  a  leader.  St.  George's  future 
on  the  East  Side  depended  on  its  success  or  its  failure  in  winnng 
the  confidence  of  its  neglected  little  ones. 

Here  I  had  my  first  real  meeting  with  the  living  thing  Jacob 
Riis  afterward  immortalized  as  "Tony,"1  and  I  love  to  re- 
member that  Riis  first  saw  Tony  pasting  the  ugly  old  stained- 
glass  windows  of  St.  George's  (the  lower  ones)  with  mud.  If 
we  had  things  to  teach  Tony,  Tony  certainly  had  much  to 
teach  us.  His  home  a  slum  tenement,  no  room  or  little  room  for 
him  at  school,  no  understanding  of  him  when  he  did  get  a  place 

xSee  chapter  on  "Four  Dinners"  for  the  story  of  how  Tony  made  good. 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  237 

in  school,  and  when  he  broke  from  school's  unsympathetic  and 
most  unnatural  restraint,  then  a  bad  law,  shamefully  adminis- 
tered, which  tied  his  wild,  vivid  boyhood  up  with  older  and  vi- 
cious criminals,  in  a  prison  for  truants.  No  place  to  play  but 
the  street,  and  no  peace  in  the  street  for  the  ubiquitous  "cop," 
his  natural  enemy.  Everything  that  stood  for  order  and  for 
property,  the  policeman,  the  landlord,  the  church,  all  were 
against  him.  Even  in  the  parks  he  was  faced  with  "  Keep  off 
the  grass."     So  there  was  nothing  left  him  but  the  gutter. 

Yes,  as  I  got  up  that  afternoon  with  very  considerable  diffi- 
culty and  delay  from  the  accumulated  dirt  of  that  squalid  room 
back  of  the  saloon  on  Avenue  A,  my  heart  went  out  to  those 
romping  ragamuffins  who  had  thrown  me  on  the  floor.  What  a 
dirty  and  neglected  crew  they  were,  and  yet  what  infinite  possi- 
bilities! What  abundant  life  was  packed  away  under  their 
ragged  jackets!  I  had  started  out  intending  to  reach  their 
fathers  and  mothers,  and  here  the  children  had  pushed  in  between. 
Though  they  may  not  have  been  aware  of  it,  they  had  a  purpose. 
They  wanted  to  see  and  know  if  we  had  anything  to  give  them 
worth  while;  if  to  their  so  empty  and  neglected  lives  we  could 
bring  anything  better  than  they  had  been  accustomed  to. 

I  shook  as  much  of  the  filth  off  my  clothes  as  I  could  and 
went  home  with  much  to  think  about. 

When  I  look  back  on  my  twenty-four  years  of  service  in  St. 
George's,  I  cannot  remember  that  I  ever  failed  to  win  a  response 
when  I  called  for  volunteers  for  any  work,  however  difficult. 
I  never  asked  for  aid  in  any  undertaking  that  required  more 
tact  and  patience  than  did  this  business  of  the  Avenue  A  Sun- 
day School,  and  never  did  I  have  aid  more  efficient.  Some  of 
my  strongest  and  best  new  members  came  at  once.  Frederick 
H.  Betts,  a  noted  lawyer  and  a  member  of  my  vestry,  and  Mrs. 
Betts,  Miss  Blandina  Marshall,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  T.  Bryant  Lind- 
ley  (now  in  Africa),  Mrs.  James  M.  Ruggles,  Mr.  H.  E.  Eggles- 
ton,  and  a  few  more  came  and,  what  was  even  more  important, 
stayed  with  the  school  till  we  could  move  it  up  to  16th  Street, 
which  finally  we  did  with  very  little  loss  of  personnel. 

The  effect  that  little  school  had  (we  opened  it  first  on  Sun- 
day afternoons,  then  in  the  mornings  as  well)  on  the  whole 
work  of  the  church  was  profound.  It  illustrated  and  explained 
our  purpose  as  nothing  else  could.     The  place  came  to  serve  as 


238  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

a  common  meeting  ground,  a  modest  bridge  across  which  East 
Siders  who  had  given  up  all  church  life  did  seek  and  find  a  place 
in  the  great  congregation  composed  of  all  sorts  and  conditions 
of  men.  But  to  win  and  hold  that  meeting  ground  took  in- 
telligent, self-denying,  and  regular  work;  and  forgiving  it,  a 
debt  is  due  to  that  first  little  band  of  volunteers  who  so 
promptly  came  to  my  call. 

I  will  tell  another  story  of  those  early  days.  One  Sunday 
afternoon  I  noticed  a  big,  strong,  fine-looking  young  man  come 
into  the  room  after  I  had  opened  the  school.  He  stood  at  the 
door  looking  over  the  classes.  There  were  a  dozen,  with  about 
one  hundred  boys  and  girls.  Presently  he  picked  out  a  class 
of  elderly  boys  taught  by  a  good-looking  lady  and  seated  himself 
at  the  upper  end  of  the  form  near  her.  I  watched  him  and 
presently  saw  my  teacher's  face  flush  as  she  moved  her  chair 
farther  away  from  the  man.  I  suspected  what  had  happened. 
The  man  was  drunk  and  was  talking  smut  to  the  teacher.  I 
walked  over  and  told  him  to  get  out.  He  looked  defiance  and 
refused  to  move.  I  said,  "We  are  here  to  help  you  people,  and 
you  know  it.  This  lady  only  comes  here  because  she  wants  to 
help  you.  She  is  not  paid  anything  for  coming;  you  know  that, 
too.  Now  you  are  enough  of  a  man  to  respect  a  lady.  Why  do 
you  sit  here  and  try  by  your  talk  to  make  it  impossible  for  her 
to  teach  her  boys  or  to  come  here  at  all  ?  You  are  drunk  or  you 
would  not  do  so  unmanly  a  thing.  I  don't  want  to  call  a 
policeman.     You  get  up  and  go  out  of  the  room  quietly." 

I  was  watching  my  man  carefully,  meanwhile.  He  was  just 
drunk  enough  to  be  ugly  and  there  was  fight  in  his  eye.  So  I 
edged  my  foot  back  a  bit  till  I  felt  firmly  the  iron  leg  of  the 
form  that  was  screwed  to  the  floor  and  got  a  good  purchase 
against  it.  I  had  spoken  quietly,  not  raising  my  voice,  and  as 
I  said  "Go  out,"  he  swore  at  me  and  jumped  to  his  feet.  He 
was  almost  as  tall  and  quite  as  heavy  as  I  was,  but  before  he 
could  raise  his  hands  I  hit  him  on  the  chin  with  all  the  power  of 
arm  and  body  I  could  put  into  a  right-hand  jog.  He  went 
down  in  a  heap  and  lay  there.  When  he  began  to  come  to  I 
stood  over  him  and  said,  "Have  you  had  enough?"  He  said, 
"Yes."     "All  right;  now  get  out,"  and  he  went. 

Some  weeks  after  we  got  into  a  slight  scrimmage  outside  the 
Sunday-school  room  with  some  toughs,  one  of  whom  seemed  to 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  239 

want  a  fight.  To  my  horror  I  saw,  elbowing  his  way  through 
the  crowd,  this  same  tall  handsome  rascal  that  I  had  knocked 
out,  and  I  began  to  feel  that  I  was  in  serious  trouble.  To  my 
amazement  and  relief  he  walked  up  to  the  ringleader  and  said, 
"The  Doctor  and  me  can  clean  out  this  saloon;  you  get  out." 
He  got  out  at  once. 

My  story  has  a  tragic  ending:  I  think  it  must  have  been  a 
year  later  when  the  big  fellow  came  to  me  at  the  rectory  one 
night.  "  Doctor,  I  do  want  to  go  straight.  I  have  been  a  bar- 
tender; I  have  been  a  thief."  He  linked  the  two  professions 
together.  "I  can  get  a  good  paying  job  in  more  than  one 
saloon  round  here  for  I  know  the  boys  and  they  come  where  I 
am.  But  whiskey  makes  me  a  brute  as  you  know,  and  as  long 
as  I  tend  bar  I  can't  keep  away  from  it  and  I  can't  break  with 
the  gang.  I  want  to  quit  drink,  and  I  want  to  quit  the  'busi- 
ness,'" (of  a  thief,  he  meant),  "and  I  have  tried  and  tried,  but  I 
can't  get  another  job.  The  cops  know  me  and  are  against  me. 
If  you  will  trust  me  with  the  money  I'll  work  a  push  cart,  and 
I  think  I  can  make  it  go." 

"How  much  do  you  want?" 

"Seventy-five  dollars." 

I  gave  him  the  money  and  said  what  cheering  things  I  could, 
for  here  was  Tony  grown  up  and  I  truly  longed  for  that  man. 
He  was  so  fine  and  well-built,  so  handsome  and  strong;  vice  had 
not  yet  spoiled  either  his  face  or  figure.  A  splendid  bit  of  man- 
hood gone  wrong — nay,  more,  pushed  wrong.  He  would  have 
made  a  first-class  soldier. 

In  a  couple  of  months  he  paid  me  back  the  money.  It  was 
some  time  before  I  saw  him  again,  but  one  night  he  came  to 
my  study  at  209  East  16th  Street. 

"It's  no  good,  Doctor.  I  can't  make  it.  I  did  well  at  first, 
but  these  damned  Jews  are  crowding  me  out.  I  am  going 
back  into  'business,'  but  I  won't  do  it  any  longer  in  a  small  way, 
and  I'll  promise  you  one  thing:  I'll  never  take  another  man's 
life."     He  had  made  up  his  mind  and  I  could  not  move  him. 

Not  very  long  after  a  band  of  three  burglars  were  cornered 
by  the  police  in  the  act  of  boring  the  safe  of  a  large  bank,  I 
think  in  Jersey  City.  One  of  them,  at  the  point  of  the  pistol, 
held  off  the  police  while  his  confederates  escaped.  At  last  the 
police  rushed  him  and  beat  him  down.     He  had  held  them  up 


24o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

with  an  unloaded  revolver.  It  was  my  poor  fine  "Tony"  of 
Avenue  A.  I  saw  him  in  prison,  where  very  soon  he  died  of 
galloping  consumption. 

I  have  said  at  the  beginning  of  this  chapter  that  we  three 
worked  well  together.  I  found  that  Wilson  had  above  all 
other  desires  a  passion  for  trying  to  reach  and  save  the  "down- 
and-outers."  It  was  its  appeal  to  these  that  had  drawn  him  to 
the  Salvation  Army  at  Kingston,  in  the  '80's.  At  that  time  the 
East  Side  was  thronged  with  human  failures,  advertising 
their  failure  to  get  a  meal.  There  were  missions  many  and 
bread  lines  long,  and  the  offer  of  a  hot  cup  of  coffee  and  a  sand- 
wich would  quickly  fill  any  downtown  mission  hall.  In  the 
adult  work  of  Avenue  A  I  gave  my  dear  Saint  his  head  and  the 
best  financial  support  I  could  afford.  He  drew  round  him,  as 
was  natural,  a  following  of  men  and  women  who  also  preferred 
work  of  this  sort  to  any  other.  Together  day  and  night,  for 
many  years,  they  sought  in  street  and  tenement  and  in  the 
mission  the  shifting  and  most  elusive  "bum."  Gradually  I 
had  given  up,  perhaps  more  even  than  I  knew,  my  appeal  to 
that  class.  I  preached  on  the  streets  sometimes,  and  at  all 
sorts  of  halls  and  missions,  but  the  conviction  grew  on  me  that 
I  could  accomplish  better  work  in  other  fields.  The  most  lost 
bum  was  not  always  a  bum.  That  i$  the  tragic  feature  of  the 
situation.  Yet  I  could  not  avoid  facing  the  fact  that  once  a 
man  has  sunk  to  real  bum-dom,  the  chance  of  lifting  him  out  of 
such  a  life  is  small  indeed. 

I  have  known  many  bums  who  were  not  drunkards  at  all. 
One  extraordinarily  clever  fellow  never  came  to  Avenue  A  with- 
out his  Horace  in  his  pocket,  which  he  knew  from  cover  to  cover; 
and  he  was  a  better  classicist  than  Wilson,  and  Wilson  was  a 
good  classicist.  Where  he  came  from  or  how  he  came  to  be 
what  he  was  he  would  never  tell.  I  do  not  think  that  man  had 
ever  done  an  honest  day's  work  in  his  life. 

I  supported  Wilson  at  Avenue  A  with  paid  assistants  some- 
times. I  think  S.  H.  Hadley  was  the  ablest  of  these.  William 
James,  in  "The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,"  pages 
201-03,  gives  Mr.  Hadley 's  own  account  of  his  conversion.  He 
was  an  exceedingly  good  speaker,  and  had  had  long  experience 
in  dealing  with  the  male  wreckage  of  great  cities.  No  better  or 
more  capable  missioner  could  be  found.     We  gave  him  in  all 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  241 

things  his  own  way,  and  he  had  back  of  him  an  able  and  en- 
thusiastic support. 

We  put  into  that  mission  all  our  energy.  For  the  time  being 
other  church  work  was  regarded  as  of  secondary  importance. 
But  its  results,  so  far  as  I  could  judge  of  them,  were  far  from 
satisfactory.  I  felt  more  convinced  than  ever  that  the  em- 
phasis was  wrong.  A  down-and-out  man,  a  bumy  a  drunkard, 
these  are  the  very  last  who  should  be  pushed  to  their  feet  to  tell  to 
others  a  religious  experience  that  they  have  had  or  suppose  them- 
selves to  have  had.  To  do  so  is  to  strike  strings  already  out  of 
tone,  and  none  I  think  can  attend  such  services  and  listen  for 
long  to  the  experiences  they  produce  and  attach  real  impor- 
tance in  permanent  value  to  the  one  or  the  other.  Dealing 
with  human  nature  is  serious  and  responsible  work,  and  to 
suppose  that  mortal  moral  wounds  that  have  drained  the  life 
blood  for  years  can  be  quickly  cured  by  a  "first  aid  to  the  in- 
jured" sort  of  religion  is  a  very  dangerous  error.  That  is  my 
criticism  in  a  nutshell  of  the  Gospel  Mission  method  of  saving 
a  city's  "rounders."  We  have  only  a  short  time  to  work 
and  very  limited  means  to  work  with.  Our  duty  is  to  employ 
that  time  and  those  means  in  the  most  fruitful  way  we  know. 

There  are  degrees  of  lostness  in  men.  It  is  folly  to  ignore 
them.  Though  we  worked  long  and  faithfully  at  Avenue  A, 
we  succeeded  in  drawing  into  healthy  church  relationships  a 
few,  only  a  few,  of  those  adults  who  had  lapsed  from  all  church 
attendance  for  a  long  time.  We  did  not,  so  far  as  I  can  re- 
member, get  one  single  genuine  "  down-and-outer "  to  join  the 
church.  But  we  got  children  for  the  asking,  and  during  my 
twenty-four  years'  rectorship  we  received  into  the  church's 
membership  more  than  three  thousand  young  people  from  the 
East  Side  alone. 

As  I  read  over  what  I  have  written  I  feel  that  I  may  seem  to 
criticize  unfairly  the  work  of  some  of  the  very  best  men  I  have 
known.  Such  is  not  my  desire.  But  here  again  in  New  York 
I  could  not  but  see  that  the  same  mistake  had  been  made,  and 
still  was  being  made,  that  the  Evangelical  party  I  knew  so  well 
had  made  in  England  long  before.  The  church's  emphasis 
was  wrong.  Men  outside  her  fold  were  crying  not  for  rescue 
but  for  justice.  They  called  for  bread;  we  gave  them  a  stone — 
a  religious  stone. 


242  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

The  church's  policy  was  a  hand-to-mouth  policy;  for  the 
contaminating  and  spreading  evil  of  a  bad  environment  the 
church  had  no  policy  at  all.  To  comfort  and  help  with  doles 
an  overworked  and  "sweated "  family  was  not  what  was  wanted 
and  the  sufferers  knew  it.  What  was  needed  was  a  radical 
change  in  those  conditions  that  made  such  householding  possi- 
ble. 

I  have  referred  to  the  Evangelical  party's  blindness  to  the 
church's  social  duty  to  the  poor,  but  such  blindness  was  not 
confined  to  one  party.  High  Churchmen  were  just  as  con- 
vinced as  were  Low  that  reforms  were  none  of  their  business. 
Certain  facts  came  to  my  knowledge  as  to  conditions  obtaining 
in  some  of  the  houses  owned  by  Trinity  Corporation.  Not 
only  was  the  church  getting  rent  from  saloons,  but  at  least  one 
brothel  I  knew  of  was  church  property.  I  laid  the  facts  I  had 
learned  before  my  senior  warden,  Charles  Tracy.  He  satisfied 
himself  as  to  the  facts,  and  he  and  I  then  called  on  the  rector, 
Doctor  Dix,  who  referred  us  to  the  vestry,  the  clerk  of  which 
body  at  that  time  was  a  personal  friend  of  Mr.  Tracy.  Mr. 
Tracy  wrote  stating  the  facts,  and  asking  for  action  by  Trinity 
vestry.  Two  letters  passed  between  my  warden  and  that  body, 
still  nothing  was  done.  Mr.  Tracy  and  I  then  stated  that  if  in 
the  specific  case  we  named  the  matter  was  not  attended  to,  we 
would  be  obliged  to  bring  it  up  before  the  Diocesan  Convention 
of  the  Church.     Under  such  pressure  at  last  action  was  taken. 

There  are  many  who  are  disheartened  as  they  face  the  evil  of 
a  great  city.  If  they  but  knew  how  great  has  been  the  advance 
since  the  time  I  speak  of  they  would  not  be  so  despondent.  The 
moral  advance  in  the  life  of  the  community  has  been  a  steady 
advance.  But  as  an  agency  for  effecting  God's  will,  the 
churches  have  lost  a  great  chance.  They  are  not  reaching  and 
there  is  small  prospect  that  they  will  reach  the  labouring  class. 
They  are  not  associated,  in  the  worker's  mind,  with  any  intel- 
ligent, persistent  effort  to  gain,  for  him  and  his,  common  justice. 
They  turned  a  stupid,  deaf,  unbrotherly  ear  to  Labour's  bitter 
cry,  and  Labour  has  now  turned  away  its  ear  from  the  Church's 
appeal.  Labour  told  us  what  it  wanted  years  ago;  common 
sense  should  have  told  us  it  was  only  justice  it  wanted.  In 
the  United  States  as  in  England  Labour  wanted  a  fair  show,  a 
fair  chance  to  launch  its  little  boat  on  life's  great  sea.     In  short, 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  243 

sympathetic  aid  in  bettering  an  unfair,  uneconomic,  and  unjust 
condition  of  life.  To  such  a  demand  "Come  to  Jesus  and  be 
saved"  is  no  answer  whatever. 

But  though  we  did  not  gain  the  outcasts  who  came  to  our 
mission,  the  work  there  done  by  scores  of  devoted  speakers  and 
teachers  and  visitors  had  a  widespread  and  lasting  effect  on 
the  neighbourhood,  and  we  gained  a  firmer  hold  on  the  growing 
boys.  Doctor  Wilson  was  much  more  than  a  mission  worker. 
He  was  an  admirable  class  leader,  and  to  his  call  came  from  the 
very  beginning  a  number  of  growing  boys  and  young  men.  No 
less  than  eighty-two  joined  the  Doctor's  morning  Bible  class, 
and  from  that  class  quickly  was  formed  a  brotherhood.  The 
effectiveness  of  that  first  organization,  formed  exclusively  from 
the  class  we  were  trying  to  reach,  was  one  of  the  most  en- 
couraging things  I  ever  saw  in  my  life.  They  came  to  us, 
they  were  part  of  us.  The  class  grew  to  a  membership  of  one 
hundred  and  ninety  in  three  years. 

When  Wilson  left  me,  the  Hon.  Seth  Low,  who  had  become 
a  member  of  the  vestry,  took  it  over,  and  with  great  regularity, 
amid  the  press  of  innumerable  engagements,  remained  its 
leader  for  many  years.  When  at  last  he  resigned,  Mr.  Low 
said  to  me,  "I  have  filled  a  good  many  positions,  as  Mayor  of 
Brooklyn,  President,  of  Columbia,  and  Mayor  of  New  York, 
but  in  no  position  have  I  had  so  valuable  an  opportunity  of 
coming  to  understand  my  fellow-men  as  in  this  Bible  class." 
And  that  class  had  its  beginnings  in  the  dirty  room  behind  the 
saloon,  No.  253  Avenue  A,  August  4,  1884. 

There  was  soon  no  more  rowdiness  in  the  Avenue  A  Sunday 
School.  It  became  orderly,  attendance  grew  from  seventy-five 
to  one  hundred  and  fifty.  The  children  came  on  time  and 
came  regularly,  and  the  very  poorest  brought  their  pennies. 
Twenty-five  dollars  was  given  by  the  children  to  missions,  the 
second  year  of  the  school.  Think  what  those  pennies  represented 
in  actual  self-denial  to  these  poorest  of  the  poor. 

Our  next  venture  was  a  kindergarten  in  Avenue  A.  My  wife 
was  the  first  to  urge  this  step.  She  had  a  genius  for  under- 
standing little  children.  That  kindergarten  deserves  a  chapter 
to  itself.  It  was  the  second  of  its  order  in  the  great  city.  But 
its  little  ones  were  often  my  best  helpers,  for  they  opened  to  us 
the  door  of  many  an  East  Side  home. 


244  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

I  look  back  on  the  first  few  years  of  my  work  in  St.  George's 
and  the  East  Side  with  peculiar  pleasure.  I  had  found  two 
most  unusual  fellow-workers  in  Wilson  and  Parker;  found  them 
when  I  was  beginning  to  despair  of  securing  the  sort  of  assistant 
clergy  I  needed.  Once  the  parish  work  had  gained  head,  once 
it  was  established  on  approximately  the  lines  I  had  decided  on, 
the  work  itself  trained  my  young  clergymen.  It  rubbed  and 
squeezed  excessive  "seminarism"  (to  coin  a  long  word)  out  of 
them.  They  soon  found  that  many  of  those  they  were  set  over 
knew  far  better  how  to  reach  people  than  they  did;  and  a 
mutual  spirit  of  loving  fellowship  and  common  service  drew 
clergy  and  laity  into  friendships  that  lasted  till  death. 

But  to  establish  that  sort  of  education  work,  to  spread  that 
sort  of  spirit  from  its  very  beginning  was  of  vital  importance, 
and  it  was  these  two  men  who  made  it  possible.  After  they 
left  me  I  depended  largely  on  my  admirable  lay  workers  to 
"break  my  young  clerics  in." 

We  formed  a  habit  of  walking  daily  round  the  park  (Stuyve- 
sant)  together  after  morning  prayer;  and  during  that  half 
hour  we  exchanged  experiences  and  made  plans,  and  last  and 
not  least  told  stories.  Stories  of  Wilson's  adventures  with 
his  bums,  which  by  the  way  he  always  kept  to  himself  at  first 
till  Parker,  who  infallibly  guessed  at  a  good  story,  if  Wilson  had 
one,  managed  to  drag  it  forth.  Then  the  "Holy  one"  (as 
Parker  laughingly  called  him)  would  let  his  last  pet  cat  out  of 
the  bag,  and  from  the  windows  overlooking  the  park  decorous 
ladies  were  scandalized,  I  fear,  at  seeing  three  clergymen  fairly 
contorted  with  laughter.  Here  is  one  of  his  stories  that  he 
succeeded  in  keeping  to  himself  for  quite  a  time. 

He  had  begged  for  an  all-night  prayer  meeting  at  Avenue 
A,  and  he  had  his  way.  Bible  reading,  exhortation,  singing, 
and  prayer.  The  night  was  well  advanced,  and  the  meeting 
had  become,  as  was  inevitable,  a  sort  of  religious  endurance  test. 
One  after  another  had  prayed  for  anything  and  everything  he 
could  think  of.  From  generalities  the  petitioners  had  passed  to 
personalities.  They  prayed  for  the  mission,  for  the  church, 
for  the  clergy,  for  themselves,  and  as  time  passed,  the  names 
of  many  attendants  at  the  meetings  came  to  mind.  "O 
Lord,  bless  Widow  X,"  prayed  one,  "send  her  someone  to  pay 
her  rent."     "Amen."     "Send  her  a  barrel  of  coal."     "Amen." 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  245 

"Send  her  a  barrel  of  cabbages."  "Amen."  The  petitioner's 
list  was  giving  out  and  here  came  a  pause.  "O  Lord,  send 
her — send  her — a  barrel  of  pepper — oh,  hell,  that's  too  much 
pepper."  After  that  Wilson  thought  it  was  time  to  go  home, 
which  they  all  did. 

One  more  story,  not  of  the  slums.  Wilson  was  a  conscien- 
tious visitor,  and  greatly  enjoyed  that  part  of  his  work.  We 
each  had  a  district  of  our  own  to  visit,  and  what  we  learned  in 
visiting  was  duly  reported. 

Among  the  names  Wilson  found  on  his  visiting  list  was  one 
"Potter."  Wilson  was  vaguely  under  the  impression  that  he 
had  heard  that  name  as  belonging  to  an  actress.  (The  Bishop's 
niece  was  an  admired  actress  then.)  He  entered  a  charming 
home  and  was  kindly  greeted  by  his  hostess,  but  neither  the 
interior  nor  its  mistress  suggested  the  theatre.  In  time  the 
conversation  turned  to  matters  of  religion,  and  Wilson  asked 
if  the  good  lady's  husband  attended  any  church  regularly.  "He 
is  a  great  church-goer,  but  he  wanders  round  a  good  deal." 
Wilson  tried  to  suggest  that  it  might  be  better  to  settle  on  one 
church,  but  the  lady  here  put  him  off,  saying  that  he  must  call 
again  and  talk  the  matter  over  with  her  good  husband  himself. 
Wilson  agreed  and,  calling  again,  was  introduced  to  Henry  C. 
Potter,  his  Bishop. 

After  seven  years  of  invaluable  aid,  Wilson  resigned  his  as- 
sistantship  in  order  to  become  associate  pastor  of  the  Gospel 
Tabernacle  Church,  44th  Street  and  Eighth  Avenue,  whose 
pastor  was  Doctor  A.  B.  Simpson.  From  an  ecclesiastical 
point  of  view  his  continuing  in  Episcopal  orders  after  taking 
this  step  was  of  course  irregular,  and  for  a  time  I  greatly  feared 
he  would  be  obliged  to  resign  his  orders.  But  the  Bishop's 
kind  patience  and  wisdom  saved  a  good,  and  at  heart  most 
loyal,  servant  for  our  church. 

There  are,  in  this  loud,  stunning  tide 

Of  human  care  and  crime, 
With  whom  the  melodies  abide 

Of  everlasting  chime. 

Of  such  was  Henry  Wilson.  Wherever  they  are,  our  world 
is  the  better  for  their  passing,  but  seldom  are  they  balanced 
men.    They  see  and  feel  and  believe  too  intensely  to  have  an 


246  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

all-round  view  of  things;  and  this  was  my  dear  friend's  limita- 
tion. When  his  fine  loyalty  to  me  made  him  unwilling  to 
preach,  morning,  noon,  and  night,  a  gospel  of  bodily  health  in 
St.  George's  parish,  he  felt  he  could  no  longer  stay  there  as 
assistant,  and  in  my  absence  (I  was  very  ill  at  the  time)  practi- 
cally committed  himself  to  Doctor  Simpson.  When  I  returned 
I  did  what  I  could  to  retain  my  friend  by  my  side,  but  it  was  in 
vain.  Failing  in  this  I  went  to  Bishop  Potter,  but  my  dear 
Saint  had  got  ahead  of  me,  and  in  a  letter,  dated  October  22, 
1 891,  had  declared  his  intention  of  giving  up  his  orders,  and  re- 
signing from  the  Episcopal  Church. 

There  was  no  precedent,  so  far  as  I  know,  for  Wilson's  course 
or  the  Bishop's  action  in  ignoring  its  irregularity,  but  ignore 
it  he  finally  did,  and  for  many  years  a  band  of  men  and  women 
who  were  trying  to  serve  their  Master  and  help  their  fellow-men 
met  regularly,  at  eight  o'clock  on  Sunday  mornings,  in  a  little 
room  fitted  up  as  a  chapel  on  one  side  of  the  Tabernacle  on 
Eighth  Avenue,  and  there  Wilson  administered  to  them  the 
Sacrament  he  loved,  after  the  order  of  the  old  Church  he  also 
loved  with  all  his  heart. 

Here  fittingly  I  must  close  the  story  of  my  friend.  After  he 
left  me  we  seldom  met.  His  path  led  one  way,  mine  another. 
Two  or  three  times  a  year  we  exchanged  letters,  and  I  cannot 
refrain  from  printing  the  last  I  received  from  him.  It  was 
written  a  few  weeks  before  he  died,  almost  sixteen  years  after 
we  had  parted,  and  I  received  it  in  Africa,  when  he  was  dead: 

June   22,  1907. 
My  beloved  Friend, — 

Your  dear  face,  in  a  picture  over  my  bed,  looks  at  me  every  morning  and 
evening  as  I  rise  and  retire.  But  much  oftener  than  that,  many  times  a  day 
and  in  the  night,  I  lift  you  up  in  loving  prayer  "  to  Him  who  ever  liveth  to 
make  intercession."  That  is  the  one  thing  I  can  and  will  do  for  you,  dear 
heart,  for  whom  I  would  give  worlds,  if  I  have  them,  to  have  you  back  and 
fit  for  work. 

As  for  me  and  my  work,  of  which  you  ask.  I  am  well  and  thoroughly 
happy  in  it.  Twenty  thousand  miles  travelled  last  year;  meetings  in  seventy 
cities  and  towns,  meetings  thrice  and  four  times  a  day,  and  this  with  a  spring 
of  joy  not  known  in  the  old  days.  Hardly  an  ache  or  a  pain  for  twenty-five 
years,  and  so  young  and  fresh  in  feeling  that  I  am  like  a  boy  at  play  more 
than  a  man  at  work.    You,  too,  will  renew  your  youth — even  yours. 

Ever  loving, 

Henry  Wilson. 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  247 

If  we  are  really  honest  with  ourselves  we  must  admit  that  it 
is  a  rare  thing  to  know  a  man  who,  without  hesitation  or  back- 
ward look,  is  willing  to  place  his  very  all  on  the  altar.  Such  was 
he.  He  was  wholly  given  to  his  Master,  mind,  body,  goods. 
He  was  not  his  own,  and  "  the  life  that  he  lived  in  the  flesh,  he 
lived  by  the  faith  of  the  Son  of  God."  Thousands  of  children, 
and  thousands  no  longer  children  but  who  as  children  first  knew 
him,  thank  God  that  they  ever  looked  into  his  handsome, 
kindly  face. 

Churches  have  few  honours  for  holy  men;  not  while  they 
live.  Honours  do  not  seek  them,  and  they  are  too  fully  oc- 
cupied with  "the  King's  business"  to  seek  after  anything  else. 
But  still  to-day  Christiana  and  her  children,  as  they  set  their 
faces  toward  the  Celestial  City,  are  led  and  guarded  as  of  old 
by  Mr.  Greatheart.  His  shining  armour  and  holy  courage  they, 
at  least,  are  quick  to  see.  And  Mr.  Greatheart  himself  was  no 
more  stainless  soldier  than  was  this  humble,  fearless  man  of 
God,  who  worked  so  joyously  to  the  very  end.  The  King's 
highway  will  be  lonelier  to  many  because  he  no  longer  treads  it 
with  them. 

Two  other  enterprises  we  undertook  in  those  early  days. 
One  was  a  failure;  the  other  a  great  success.  I  was  urged  to 
undertake  a  mission  in  the  old  Epiphany  House,  130  Stanton 
Street.  I  found  in  two  or  three  years'  time  that  it  was  be- 
yond our  strength,  and  when  St.  George's  gave  it  up,  Bishop 
Potter  took  personal  charge. 

I  hope  I  learned  things  of  value  by  our  failure  at  the  old 
Epiphany  House.  I  had  at  least  an  opportunity  of  measuring 
difficulties  that  cannot  be  appreciated  by  those  who  have  not 
had  experience  in  dealing  with  the  massed  foreign  populations 
to  be  found  in  New  York.  I  can  say  I  know  how  these  people 
should  not  be  served,  and  that  is  the  way  all  the  churches,  ex- 
cepting the  Roman  Catholic  (and  in  her  case  I  can  only  make  a 
partial  exception),  have  attempted  and  still  are  attempting 
to  serve  them.  There  is  no  true  strategy  in  present  missionary 
effort.  The  little  churches  and  little  men  are  set  to  attempt 
the  biggest  and  hardest  jobs.  Where  our  social  neglect  and 
selfishness  and  short-sightedness  have  resulted  in  the  denial 
of  all  beauty  and  spaciousness  to  the  toilers  of  our  city,  there 
should  the  Church  come,  bringing  both. 


248  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

The  small  mission  church,  struggling  to  live,  equipped  with 
second-rate  machinery,  human  and  material,  can  never  succeed 
and  is  a  waste  of  energy.  We  were  facing  then  and  we  are 
facing  still  the  fact  that,  excuse  it  as  we  may,  the  policy  of  all 
the  Christian  churches  has  been  one  of  retreat.  When  prob- 
lems have  increased  the  churches  have  solved  them  by  getting 
out.  There  was  no  true  courage  in  leaving  the  south  of  the  island 
and  crowding  to  the  north  of  it.  If  it  was  inevitable  it  was  on 
its  face  an  admission  of  defeat.  It  was  an  admission  that  the 
churches  were  institutions  intended  for  and  supported  by  the 
rich  and  the  well-to-do — that  they  had  lost  the  power  of  win- 
ning the  poor.  I  say  if  the  modern  city  church  has  got  to  that 
point,  let  her  confess  it.  But  to  go  north  and  leave  a  half- 
starved  mission  behind  her  is  not  only  a  cowardly  policy  but  a 
dishonest  policy  as  well. 

Considerations  like  these  I  had  in  mind  when  the  scheme  for 
a  great  New  York  Cathedral1  was  laid  before  the  public,  and 
naturally  I  longed  that  that  great  church  should  stand  among 
the  poor.  I  hope  that  the  Cathedral  on  Morningside  Heights 
will  some  day  draw  within  its  spell  all  sorts  and  conditions  of 
people.  But  when  Bishop  Potter  set  himself  to  push  that 
enterprise,  I  pleaded  for  a  downtown  Cathedral,  set  in  a  great 
block  of  open  ground  where,  in  the  name  of  Jesus,  beauty  from 
without  and  within,  and  with  beauty  breathing  space  for  the 
smothering  millions,  might  make  their  appeal  to  those  folk  who 
so  sorely  needed  both. 

I  am  not  now  finding  fault  with  the  choice  of  the  site  made, 
but  I  am  still  convinced  that  the  way  to  reach  the  non-church- 
going  un-Americanized  masses  is  to  place  the  great  churches 
where  they  are  face  to  face  with  the  great  social  need  of  men. 
In  such  places  the  old  cathedrals  were  builded,  and  well  they 
did  their  work.     There  is  the  place  for  the  modern  cathedral. 

I  learned  one  thing  of  great  value  to  me  at  the  old  Epiphany 
House:  that  was  that  German  and  often  Jewish  parents,  who 
refused  to  darken  a  church  door  themselves,  were  ready  and 
eager  to  cooperate  with  us  when  we  tried  to  gain  their  children 
for  our  schools  and  classes.  It  really  seemed  that  the  farther 
the  Germans  lived  from  the  church,  the  readier  they  were  to 

xThe  Bishop  made  me  one  of  the  Cathedral  Trustees,  but  the  present  site  was  fixed  on  be- 
fore my  election  to  that  body. 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  249 

have  their  children  go  there.  In  short,  the  old  Epiphany 
House  but  confirmed  what  Avenue  A  had  witnessed:  you  can 
win  the  second  generation^  if  you  have  failed  with  the  first.  I 
state  the  simple  fact  when  I  say  that,  from  1885  to  1906,  a 
steady  flow  of  children  born  of  German  parents  into  the  active 
membership  of  St.  George's  never  ceased.  They  came  into 
the  church  and  they  stayed  in  it,  and  they  supported  it  with 
their  work  and  their  money,  too,  both  willingly  and  liberally 
given.  And  to  this  day,  scattered  all  over  the  city,  they  call 
themselves  St.  George's  folk. 

When  I  resigned  my  rectorship  in  1906,  quite  one  third  of 
the  membership  of  St.  George's  was  German  born.  And  I  will 
say  yet  another  thing  about  these  German  neighbours  of  mine, 
who  would  not  come  regularly  to  the  church,  but  who  did  trust 
us  with  their  boys  and  girls.  They  were,  when  the  World  War 
broke  out,  with  very,  very  few  exceptions,  right  loyal  citizens  of 
the  land  of  their  adoption. 

And  now  I  must  speak  of  the  second  enterprise  I  referred  to, 
which  was  a  success.  St.  George's  Boys'  Club  was  organized 
on  January  7,  1884,  at  a  meeting  held  in  St.  George's  rectory, 
there  being  present  Messrs.  Murray,  Waterworth,  Lockwood, 
Minturn,  and  Collins.  Evert  Wendell  afterward  joined  the 
group.  These  young  men  felt  that  they  were  not  specially 
fitted  for  Sunday-school  or  ordinary  mission  work,  and  pre- 
ferred to  try  to  reach  and  help  the  boys  of  the  neighbourhood 
by  way  of  a  social  club. 

I  told  them  to  go  and  look  the  ground  over,  and  any  plan  they 
agreed  upon  I  would  support.  A  crowd  of  boys  was  easily 
collected,  and  on  Monday  and  Thursday  evenings  these  young 
men  met  the  lads.  At  first  the  aim  of  the  organization  was  just 
to  give  a  good  time.  Later  a  small  house,  237  East  21st  Street, 
was  rented,  a  library  was  opened,  and  at  the  boys'  request 
classes  were  undertaken.  A  type-setting  class  was  a  success, 
and  the  boys  themselves  organized  a  debating  society.  Next, 
classes  in  stenography  and  drawing  and  modelling  and  car- 
pentry all  drew  applicants.  Remember,  at  this  time  there  was 
no  industrial  training  whatever  given  in  the  public  schools. 
Auchmulty's  Industrial  School  was  the  one  place  in  the  whole 
city  where  a  poor  lad  could  learn  the  rudiments  of  the  trade 
he  would  adopt  for  life. 


250  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Remember,  also,  that  most  mistakenly  the  labour  unions 
placed  limitations  on  the  number  of  lads  that  were  permitted  to 
seek  apprenticeship  in  the  various  trades,  and  there  was  no 
other  door  of  entrance  open  to  them.  This  has  been  denied 
vigorously,  of  course,  but  from  my  own  direct  knowledge  I 
know  it  to  have  been  true. 

I  need  not  tell  at  length  the  ups  and  downs  of  our  boys'  in- 
dustrial club,  nor  of  the  many  changes  we  made  in  the  methods 
adopted.  Evert  Wendell,  playing  his  own  accompaniments, 
and  singing  innumerable  songs,  was  its  chief  apostle.  It  very 
steadily  grew  into  a  teaching  school.  Fun  was  not  absent,  there 
being  a  gymnasium  that  was  well  patronized,  and  the  seaside 
for  its  regular  members  in  summer.  But  a  good  time,  if  it  was 
needed  by  the  East  Side  boy,  was  a  secondary  need.  Our  boys 
were  in  danger  of  starting  wrong  in  life  and  staying  wrong. 
I  said  that  the  parents  were  our  willing  allies  in  doing  what 
they  could  to  induce  their  children  to  come  to  our  Sunday 
Schools  and  week-day  classes;  but  this  aid  of  theirs  was  apt  to 
lessen,  sometimes  to  cease  altogether,  sometimes  to  change 
into  opposition,  as  soon  as  the  children  were  fourteen  years  or 
older.  After  that  age,  it  was  pathetic  to  notice  what  a  large 
proportion  of  them  thought  first  of  the  two  and  a  half  or  three 
dollars  their  children  could  earn  weekly.  What  their  work  might 
be  did  not  seem  to  matter  much.  I  found  parents,  not  bad  par- 
ents either,  who  actually  did  not  know  what  work  their  children 
were  doing,  or  even  where  they  were  doing  it. 

The  times  were  hard,  cruelly  hard.  There  were  many  out 
of  work,  but  such  blindness  to  life's  real  values  means,  in  after 
years,  a  crop  of  men  and  women  who  are  a  charge  on  the  com- 
munity; and  any  one  can  see  that  religious  appeals  to  emotional 
natures  can  do  little  to  alter  such  parents  or  save  for  the  future 
the  children  brought  up  in  such  tenement  homes. 

The  study  of  these  conditions  led  me  to  attempt  an  in- 
dustrial school,  not,  as  I  have  repeatedly  said,  to  take  the 
place  of  any  institution  already  existing  but  rather  as  an  il- 
lustration in  a  small  way  of  what  most  evidently  the  East 
Side  needed  sorely,  though  the  East  Side  might  prove  stub- 
bornly ignorant  of  its  own  need.  Speaking  to  my  people  of 
the  need  of  an  industrial  school  and  of  our  aim  in  starting  it,  I 
wrote  in  1893: 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  251 

So  long  as  the  public  schools  do  not  deal  with  industrial  education,  and  at 
present,  alas!  they  do  not,  there  is  no  more  important  work  connected  with 
this  parish  than  this  I  propose  to  you.  Our  whole  idea  of  education  needs 
to  be  raised  and  developed.  The  public  schools  of  New  York  are  lamentably 
behind  the  times;  and  what  the  Church  should  do  is  to  set  an  example  of  a 
higher  standard  for  growing  girls  and  boys,  and  establish  kindergartens  for  the 
very  little  ones,  until  at  length  this  example  shall  have  done  something  to 
create  a  healthier  public  opinion,  and  at  last  our  Boards  of  Education  gain 
light  on  educational  matters  seemingly  at  present  denied  them. 

If  Henry  Wilson  and  Lindsay  Parker  had  set  their  stamp  on 
the  early  religious  work  of  St.  George's  by  commending  in  the 
right  way  to  the  right  people  the  new  aim  of  St.  George's 
Church,  I  was  again  to  be  supremely  fortunate  in  the  allies 
I  found  for  laying  on  wise  and  true  and  broad  foundations  our 
industrial  work  as  supplementary  to  our  religious  among 
East  Side  youth.  The  Rev.  Theodore  Sedgwick  joined  my 
staff  in  1 89 1.  He  was  one  of  the  most  faithful  and  indefati- 
gable servants  of  his  fellows  I  have  ever  known.  He  loved  and 
understood  boys,  and  so  boys  trusted  him.  He  won  hearts 
wherever  he  went.  To  him  I  handed  over  the  industrial  school 
— a  difficult  job — and  splendidly  did  he  discharge  his  duty  to 
it. 

We  had  then  over  five  hundred  youths,  between  fourteen 
and  twenty,  owning  some  sort  of  connection  with  the  church. 
A  large  proportion  of  these  lads  stood  in  need  of  just  what  the 
industrial  school  was  founded  to  give  them,  but  if  they  were  to 
gain  and  benefit  from  it,  a  regular  attendance  on  their  part  was 
the  first  thing  necessary.  Open  the  school  and  they  were  ready 
to  crowd  in;  but  if  they  could  not  be  depended  on  to  come  to 
the  classes  in  which  they  had  been  placed  and  to  come  on  time, 
no  lasting  benefit  could  be  had;  money  would  be  wasted,  and 
good  instruction  could  not  be  obtained.  Sedgwick  divided  up 
the  would-be  scholars  into  groups  of  from  twelve  to  twenty 
and  to  each  group  a  gentleman  visitor  was  appointed.  It 
was  his  business  to  be  present  on  certain  nights  at  the  school; 
to  be  present  regularly,  and  then  to  see  which  of  his  lads  were 
absent,  visiting  them  there  and  then. 

I  pleaded  in  St.  George's  for  more  college  and  business  men 
to  offer  themselves  for  this  oversight  of  our  East  Side  lads.  I 
had  an  immediate  response.  Among  the  newcomers  I  re- 
member Theodore  H.  Price  and  Stewart  Wortley. 


252  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

The  worry  of  providing  the  needed  money  had  broken  down 
our  first  attempt.  Now  my  senior  warden  came  to  my  aid, 
anonymously  as  usual,  for  Mr.  J.  P.  Morgan's  name  never  was 
appended  to  any  good  work  when  he  could  avoid  it;  and  free 
from  this  care,  full  of  hope,  and  well  organized  for  the  difficult 
venture  into  totally  new  fields,  we  started. 

In  a  short  while  the  number  of  those  wishing  to  attend  had 
shrunk  from  more  than  four  hundred  to  about  two  hundred,  but 
what  was  of  infinitely  greater  importance  than  the  shrinking  was 
the  fact  that  we  were  holding  the  two  hundred.  (In  a  couple 
of  years  we  had  many  more  applicants  than  we  could  take  in.) 
But  important  as  was  the  visiting  end  of  this  endeavour,  the 
school's  success  mainly  depended  on  its  teaching  staff  of  trained 
and  paid  men.  Here  again  fortune  gave  me  its  very  best. 
The  first  superintendent  was  Mr.  George  E.  Tuthill,  and 
under  him  were  two  assistants,  Mr.  Arthur  Hamerschlag  and 
Mr.  Ball. 

Arthur  Hamerschlag,  himself  a  graduate  of  Auchmulty's 
trade  school,  took  over  the  management  of  the  school  shortly 
after  its  fresh  start.  For  many  years  he  worked  his  will  in  it, 
chose  its  masters,  and  directed  it  in  matters  great  and  small, 
and  in  that  narrow  East  Side  house  of  industrial  education 
showed  to  those  who  could  see  that  he  understood  the  true 
nature  of  the  educational  problems  that  must  be  solved  if,  as 
a  people,  we  are  to  prosper. 

Of  nothing  in  all  my  life  work  am  I  prouder  than  that  with 
me  he  had  his  first  independent  job;  and  I  rejoice  when  I  think 
that  in  his  early  and  so  happy  association  with  poor  people  and 
rich  people,  wise  people  and  foolish  people  in  old  St.  George's, 
he  gained  a  knowledge  of  his  fellow-men  which  enabled  him  to 
fill  brilliantly  the  places  that  were  inevitably  assigned  him 
among  the  progressive  educators  of  the  United  States. 

Many  were  the  talks  he  and  I  had,  and  the  plans  we  made 
about  the  boys  and  for  them,  in  those  early  days.  Nor  did 
we  in  our  theorizing  leave  the  girls  out.  And  so  it  came  to 
pass  that  many  years  after  he  had  taken  sole  charge  of  my 
little  school,  I  came  to  stand,  on  a  first  great  Commencement 
day,  before  a  splendid  audience  in  Pittsburgh,  and  make  the 
address  of  welcome  to  the  women  graduates  of  that  institution, 
who  then  took  the  first  diplomas  bestowed  for  proficiency  in  a 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  253 

new  field  of  study,  woman's  own  field,  "the  Science  of  the 
Home." 

Women  gain  what  they  demand  persistently.  It  is  right 
that  they  should.  Women  demanded  that  the  universities  be 
opened  to  them  on  the  same  conditions  as  they  are  open  to  men. 
Slowly,  grudgingly,  yet  inevitably,  those  doors  have  opened  or 
are  opening. 

Women  demanded  that  they  should  compete  with  men  in 
oral  and  written  tests  of  knowledge  in  classrooms  or  labora- 
tories. Under  such  testing  they  held  their  own.  But  women 
were  and  still  are  slow  to  see,  strangely  enough,  that  when  they 
have  gained  efficiency  in  co-educational  fields  they  still  are 
not  educated;  and  that  no  success  won  in  competition  with 
men  can  be  an  evidence  of  a  sufficient  education  for  women. 
The  man  is  a  man;  the  woman  remains,  for  all  her  masculine 
accomplishment  and  learning,  a  woman.  A  man  cannot  have 
a  baby  and  a  woman  can,  and  ought  to  have  several.  And  any 
scheme  of  education,  however  brilliant  and  alluring,  that  leaves 
out  this  immense  and  radical  distinction  in  educating  the  sex 
is  a  totally  inadequate  plan. 

Mr.  Andrew  Carnegie  gave  $2,000,000  to  develop  women's 
education  in  connection  with  the  Institute  of  Technology, 
founded  and  endowed  by  him  at  Pittsburgh,1  and  there,  for  the 
first  time,  on  a  broad  and  sound  foundation,  such  a  scheme  of 
study  was  offered  to  the  young  women  of  the  city.  The  home 
is  woman's  province  undisputed,  and  the  first  step  she  must 
take  in  order  to  fill  it  to  the  joy  and  pride  of  others  and  to  her 
own  lasting  happiness  is  to  understand  the  profound  obligation 
that  sex  imposes  and  motherhood  entails.  Our  women  have 
graduated  in  many  classes  of  knowledge,  but,  alas !  multitudes 
of  them  are  sadly  ignorant  in  this.  Taking  them  in  the  mass, 
they  are  not  very  successful  mothers,  and  quite  the  worst  and 
most  extravagant  cooks  in  the  world. 

Mr.  Carnegie  was  always  remarkably  well  advised  in  the 
partners  and  assistants  he  chose  to  aid  him  in  his  ventures. 
His  great  success  has  been  largely  ascribed  to  his  judgment  of 
such  men.     When  he  sought  a  man  to  place  at  the  head  of  the 

^The  Margaret  Morrison  Division  of  the  Institute  Technology  at  Pittsburgh  was  an  experi- 
mental project  in  the  science  of  the  home.  It  was  a  leader  in  that  field.  For  its  development 
Mr.  Carnegie  gave  $2,000,000.  Simmons  College  in  Boston  and  McDonald  Institution  in 
Canada  offer  a  similar  course  of  instruction. 


254  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Institute  of  Technology  at  Pittsburgh  as  director,  he  combed 
the  country,  and  his  final  choice  fell  on  Arthur  Hamerschlag. 

Hamerschlag  had  been  with  me  for  many  years,  and  we  were 
paying  him  $1,500  a  year.  When  this  great  work  was  offered, 
with  its  salary  of  $10,000,  he  asked  my  advice.  I  advised  him 
to  accept,  rejoicing  that  to  so  admirably  fitted  an  educator 
such  a  field  for  usefulness  was  offered. 

Some  three  weeks  after  his  acceptance  he  received  a  note 
requesting  him  to  call  at  Mr.  Carnegie's  house  in  New  York. 
The  great  man  received  him  affably  and  then  said:  "Mr.  Ham- 
erschlag, I  expected  you  to  call  on  me  when  you  accepted  the 
directorate  of  this  Institute.  It  is  not  every  day  that  a  young 
man  is  offered  a  job  with  $10,000  a  year  salary."  Hamerschlag 
hesitated  and  then  replied: 

"Mr.  Carnegie,  I  thought  it  would  be  more  becoming  in  me 
to  wait  first  before  calling  on  you.  Sir,  you  are  a  busy  man, 
and  I  knew  if  you  desired  to  see  me  you  would  send  for  me." 

"Yes,"  said  Mr.  Carnegie,  "but  it  is  not  every  day  that  a 
young  man  receives  a  salary  of  $10,000  a  year." 

Soon  after  Hamerschlag  was  installed,  and  at  work.  I 
chanced  to  meet  Mr.  Carnegie  at  a  men's  dinner  at  a  friend's 
house.  There  were  eighteen  guests,  and  Bishop  Potter  was  of 
the  number.  Everyone  knows  that  Mr.  Carnegie  dearly  loved 
to  chaff  the  clergy,  and  he  was  wont  to  carry  his  badinage 
quite  as  far  as  good  taste  allowed.  He  specially  loved  to 
banter  Bishop  Potter. 

Now  our  Bishop  could  generally  hold  his  own  in  any  com- 
pany he  found  himself  in,  and  he  was  on  occasion  a  master  of  his 
rapier.  Mr.  Carnegie's  methods,  however,  suggested  the  cudgel 
rather  than  the  sword,  and  that  evening  when  cigars  came  and 
servants  left,  he  seemed  to  me  to  go  rather  far  in  his  raillery. 

I  waited  my  chance  and  when  a  pause  came  said,  "Mr. 
Carnegie,  I  do  not  think  you  are  fair  in  your  attack  on  the 
clergy." 

"Why  not,  Doctor  Rainsford?" 

"Why,  because,  sir,  when  all  over  the  land  you  were  searching 
for  a  man  to  take  direction  of  the  splendid  endowment  by  which 
you  wish  to  be  remembered  in  Pittsburgh,  you  finally  chose,  and 
wisely,  a  young  man  who  has  been  for  many  years  head  of  St. 
George's  trade  school  and  a  member  of  St.  George's  Church. 


AVENUE  A— WORK  AMONG  THE  YOUNG  255 

I  congratulate  you  on  your  choice,  sir,  but  it's  not  good  taste 
to  rail  at  the  church  that  gave  him  to  you." 

"Well,  Doctor  Rainsford,  I'll  pray  for  you,  sir;  I'll  pray  for 
you. 

Then  I  had  my  chance.  "Thank  you,  sir;  but  I'd  rather 
you  paid  in  a  coin  you  were  more  accustomed  to." 

Many  years  after  I  suddenly  almost  jostled  Mr.  Carnegie 
one  afternoon  on  Fifth  Avenue,  as  he  feebly  made  his  way 
to  his  carriage.  He  recognized  me  instantly,  and  holding  out 
his  hand  said,  "I  won't  cross  swords  with  you  again,  young 
man."  All  of  which  may  sound  egotistical,  but  it  is  worth 
telling. 

How  I  hate  to  turn  away  from  Avenue  A  and  its  memories! 
I  think  they  are  perhaps  the  best  in  my  life.  Avenue  A 
brought  to  me  some  of  the  truest  friends  I  have  had,  and  one 
of  the  best  of  them  was  Jacob  Riis.  A  lover  of,  a  believer  in 
the  East  Side  boy  was  Jacob  Riis.     He  cried: 

Save  Tony,  and  you  save  the  future.  He  is  himself  the  to-morrow.  It 
matters  less  what  tongue  he  speaks,  or  which  he  is  spoken  to  in,  than  that  he  is 
spoken  to  at  all.  He  is  yours  for  the  asking,  if  you  will  but  ask.  Were  it  not 
so,  our  immigration  problem  would  be  a  problem  indeed  not  to  be  endured. 
Tony  is  the  really  important  member  of  the  family.  The  rest  will  follow 
where  he  goes.  I  have  said  enough  to  show  the  way  all  this  is  tending,  which 
to  me  means  the  mission  of  Christianity  in  the  world.  If  it  has  not  that,  if 
it  is  not  here  to  make  men  better,  to  make  them  brothers,  if  it  lack  the  power 
to  do  that,  it  were  better  that  every  lofty  church  spire  in  the  land  be  laid  low 
until  the  lesson  be  learned. 

So  wrote  Riis  nineteen  years  ago.  As  I  write,  millions  of 
defeated  folks  are  turning  to  our  land  as  a  land  of  refuge 
and  of  hope.  There  is  a  greater  need  than  there  was,  even 
when  Jacob  Riis  wrote,  to  go  after  Tony.  It  can  be  done; 
it  must  be  done,  but  it  is  not  being  done  yet,  as  Christian  love 
and  national  safety  and  honour  cry  to  all  good  men  and  women 
to  do  it. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

Testing  of  Men  and  Measures  and  John  R 

The  spring  of  1889  f°und  St.  George's  prospering  exceed- 
ingly. Not  only  was  the  church  packed  at  the  eleven  o'clock 
service  Sunday  morning,  but  at  the  early  Communion  Service 
there  were  present  more  than  a  thousand  communicants, 
the  vastly  larger  portion  being  young  wage  workers.  The  at- 
tendance at  the  Sunday  School  and  the  various  young  people's 
classes  connected  with  it  had  so  grown  that  the  rectory,  the 
church  basement,  the  deaconess  house,  the  clergy  house,  the 
Avenue  A  mission  house,  as  well  as  a  hall  we  had  hired  near  by, 
were  all  filled  to  overflowing.  One  of  the  unusual  features  of 
this  youthful  crowd  was  that  in  it  there  were  more  males  than 
females.     From  the  first  beginnings  of  our  work  this  was  true. 

We  had  "cast  out  nets  on  the  right  side  of  the  ship,"  and  we 
had  on  our  hands  "a  great  draught  of  fishes."  There  was  no 
denying  that.  Now  I  was  anxious  to  better  the  apostolic  ex- 
perience, and  to  see  to  it  that  our  nets  did  not  break. 

Suddenly  all  we  had  done  and  all  we  planned  to  do  was 
tested — quite  severely  tested. 

Before  the  beginning  of  Lent,  I  had  gone  to  Princeton  for  a 
short  mission,  preaching  two  or  three  times  a  day  in  a  little 
church  in  the  village,  or  in  some  college  building.  I  stayed 
at  the  house  of  my  friend,  Professor  Fairfield  Osborne,  and 
when  the  day's  work  was  over,  men  from  the  University,  after 
the  pleasant  custom  of  Princeton,  drifted  in  and  we  talked  till 
all  hours,  and  it  was  earnest,  interesting  talk. 

I  had  worked  as  hard  as  I  knew  how  during  those  first  six 
years  of  my  rectorship,  going  to  bed  late  and  rising  early; 
getting  little  exercise  except  during  my  autumn  hunting  trips 
to  my  little  ranch  in  the  Rocky  Mountains.  But  I  felt  well, 
and  though  my  hours  of  sleep  grew  shorter  (and  when  I  did 
get  to  bed  my  head  was  so  full  of  things  I  wanted  to  do  and  to 

256 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  257 

say,  that  I  lay  awake  half  the  night),  it  did  not  occur  to  me  that 
I  was  overdoing  it.  Nothing  in  my  body  warned  me,  so  far  as 
I  can  remember,  of  a  coming  breakdown.  On  the  contrary, 
my  mind  seemed  unusually  alert  and  clear. 

Specially  was  this  true  during  my  stay  at  Princeton.  Speak- 
ing to  the  college  was  an  honour  and  a  delight,  and  at  night, 
when  professors  and  students  dropped  in,  and  we  talked  round 
the  fire,  anything  and  everything  I  had  ever  read  or  known 
seemed  to  be  at  my  command.  For  me  this  was  an  unusual 
experience,  as  my  memory  was  always  one  of  my  weak  spots. 

I  went  home  the  night  before  Ash  Wednesday,  and  had  to 
preach  twice  that  day  in  my  church.  In  the  morning  I  preached 
as  well  as  I  ever  preached  in  my  life,  having  the  same  illumi- 
nated and  illuminating  feeling  about  me  (I  cannot  find  a  better 
word),  and  in  the  afternoon  rose  to  preach  again.  I  gave  out 
the  hymn.  It  was  one  I  love  above  others:  "Jesus  shall 
reign."  As  I  joined  in  the  singing,  I  felt  a  soft,  warm,  foggy 
sensation  in  my  head,  as  if  someone  was  watering  it  with 
tepid  water,  and  felt  my  knees  bending  under  me,  so  that  I 
must  grasp  the  pulpit  sides  to  keep  myself  standing.  So  much 
I  clearly  remember,  and  not  much  more.  I  did  not  fall;  some- 
how I  got  to  the  vestry,  and  from  the  vestry  up  the  steps  to  my 
study  in  the  rectory  next  door.  But  of  life  for  the  next  few 
weeks  I  remember  very  little  indeed.  I  do  remember  that  it 
cost  effort  to  settle  in  my  mind  which  of  my  little  sons  was 
which. 

Mr.  Morgan,  always  to  the  fore  when  there  was  trouble,  came 
round  at  once  with  Dr.  Alfred  Loomis;  and  that  great  man  said, 
"No  more  St.  George's  for  him  for  six  months."  And  he 
might  have  said  "a  year."  So  here  was  a  testing  time  indeed 
come  on  us  unexpectedly.  We  were  like  a  crab  caught  changing 
its  shell.  We  were  off  with  the  old,  but  not  yet  on  with  the 
new.  Our  old  nest  pulled  down,  our  new,  our  parish  house, 
rising  but  not  risen.  Our  organizations  were  all  in  process  of 
change;  growing  change,  it  is  true,  but  still  change;  not  yet  with 
fitted  parts  working  harmoniously.  My  clerical  staff  had  been 
weakened  by  the  departure  of  some  of  its  members  to  accept 
parishes  of  their  own — men  I  had  trained.  This  was  as  it 
should  be,  but  of  course  the  newcomers  were  not  as  yet  at  home 
in  their  work.     Two  clerical  assistants  I  had  that  were  in- 


258  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

valuable,  Henry  Wilson,  mentioned  in  the  preceding  chapter, 
and  W.  T.  Crocker.  Crocker  took  up  the  work  Charles  Scad- 
ding1  had  surrendered,  and  during  my  long  absence,  with  rare 
tact  and  faithfulness,  did  all  one  man  could  do  to  keep  things 
going.  It  has  never  been  my  good  fortune  to  have  as  an 
assistant  one  on  whose  faithfulness,  fairness,  and  common  sense 
I  could  better  depend. 

Wilson's  presence  as  head  of  my  clergy  house  was  a  source 
of  abiding  strength.  To  preach  to  the  thronging  Sunday 
morning  congregations  was  a  task  he  was  not  specially  fitted  for. 
He  knew  this  well,  and  always  got  someone  else  to  preach  for 
him  when  he  could.  But  his  gentle  spirit,  his  unselfish  devo- 
tion, spread  round  him  an  atmosphere  which  drove  strife  and 
jealousies  far  away.  Nothing  petty  or  mean  or  uncharitable 
flourished  where  Henry  Wilson  had  rule;  and  in  our  little 
clergy  house  his  quiet  but  firm  discipline  was  a  blessing  and  a 
power  for  good  that  leavened  St.  George's  work  from  top  to 
bottom,  and  set  a  standard  for  what  that  sort  of  establishment 
ought  to  be. 

At  my  first  coming,  I  had  been  most  kindly  welcomed  by  the 
city  clergy,  more  especially  by  Rev.  Arthur  Brooks  and  Henry 
Mottet.  Everyone  knew  that  if  we  were  to  succeed  where 
others  had  signally  failed  we  must  work  hard  and  faithfully; 
so  of  criticism  there  was  little.  However,  as  the  church  filled 
and  the  parish  grew,  it  was  evident  that  St.  George's  stood  for  a 
new  departure  in  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church's  work  in  a 
great  city.  There  was  no  denying  this,  and  the  public  saw  it. 
Now  you  cannot  advocate  new  methods,  methods  so  new  that 
many  called  them  revolutionary,  without  by  implication  criti- 
cizing and  sometimes  condemning  old  and  approved  ones. 

If  the  free  church,  the  church  open  to  all,  is  right,  then  the 
pew  church  owned  by  a  few  who  can  pay  for  and  control  its 
floor  is  not  right.  In  practice  we  asserted  this;  and  in  the 
pulpit,  in  season  and  out  of  season,  I  have  preached  that  the 
very  genius  and  spirit  of  Jesus'  religion  was  denied  and  out- 
raged by  the  modern  Protestant  closed  pew  church.  Naturally, 
therefore,  we  reckoned  on  criticism,  and  by  1889  were  beginning 
to  get  it. 

But  not  on  grounds  of  polity  chiefly  did  we  incur  criticism. 

'Afterward  Bishop  of  Oregon.     He  did  excellent  work  among  the  poor. 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  259 

In  the  subject  matter  of  my  sermons  and  in  my  treatment  of 
doctrinal  questions,  many  protesting  voices  began  to  be  heard. 
For  a  time  what  we  accomplished  in  reaching  out  to  the  un- 
touched East  Side,  and  in  filling  our  nets  with  old  and  young, 
rich  and  poor,  caught  the  public  eye;  and  few  outside  or  inside 
the  church  cared  to  be  too  critical  of  what  might  be  passing 
peculiarities  of  a  voluble  Irish- American  preacher.  The  oc- 
casional listener,  "the  church  itinerant,"  does  not  criticize,  and 
if  he  does,  no  one  pays  much  heed  to  him.  But  as  a  congrega- 
tion draws  together  and  assumes  solid  shape,  criticism  is  of 
more  importance,  is  listened  to,  and  has  weight.  Now  St. 
George's  had,  after  these  first  six  years,  got  to  this  point. 
There  were  some  mere  visitors  still,  but  already  a  solid  body 
of  worshippers  had  drawn  together  because  in  the  ugly  old 
church  they  had  found  what  they  wanted. 

Some  came  because  religion  to  them  had  come  to  be  chiefly 
the  service  of  their  fellows.  They  wanted  to  give  that  service, 
and  St.  George's  was  a  working  church.  Some,  because  the 
warmth  and  fervour  of  a  great  congregational  response  drew  and 
uplifted  them.  Some,  because  my  preaching  helped  them  to 
get  a  fresh  hold  on  old  truths  that  they  feared  they  might  be 
forced  to  abandon.  One  able  business  man  told  me  years  after 
why  he  came.  "  I  came  as  a  stranger,"  he  said,  "and  the  usher 
put  a  poor  coloured  woman  alongside  me.  That  is  the  church 
for  me,  I  said  to  myself." 

Now  the  criticism  of  outsiders  I  cared  very  little  for,  but  that 
of  my  own  people  was  at  this  time  often  serious,  and,  let  me 
say  here,  continued  to  be  serious  during  all  my  ministry.  I 
think  my  sudden  illness  had  the  effect  of  silencing  for  a  time  a 
good  part  of  it,  but  certainly  it  grew  in  seriousness  as  the  years 
passed,  and  many  of  the  friends  I  valued  found  my  teaching 
so  "unsettling"  that  they  went  to  other  churches. 

It  was  hard  to  part  with  some  of  these  people.  I  remember 
one  of  them  whose  departure  I  specially  regretted,  for  he  was 
a  man  of  a  fine  spirit  and  of  sound  learning — Admiral  Mahan. 
However,  I  had  learned  my  lesson  in  Toronto,  and  knew  well 
that  no  organization  is  the  stronger  for  half-hearted  members. 
It  is  a  mistake  to  raise  so  much  as  a  finger  to  keep  any  one  in 
your  church  who  thinks  he  ought  to  get  out  of  it.  If  you  can- 
not help  him  and  lead  him  on  a  little,  someone  else  probably 


26o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

can.  And  you  certainly  cannot  help  him  or  any  one  else  by 
being  untrue  to  yourself.  Your  business,  if  you  believe  you 
have  any  business  in  the  Church  of  Jesus  at  all,  is  to  speak 
out  the  truth  as  you  see  it,  and  never,  never  "hedge." 

To  the  best  of  my  ability,  this  I  had  been  trying  to  do  during 
these  first  happy,  eventful  years  in  St.  George's.  In  New 
York,  therefore,  as  was  natural,  I  was  given  a  place  among  the 
"dangerous  men."  (See  the  cleverly  drawn  skit  from  Life.) 
In  other  states  than  New  York,  where  there  still  occasionally 
lingered  some  memory  of  work  done  in  my  earliest  missionizing 
days  (in  them,  remember,  I  was  quite  averagely  orthodox),  I 
still  stood  well,  and  my  unsoundness  in  the  faith  had  not  drawn 
general  remark.  So  much  so  that  once,  certainly,  and  I  think 
probably  a  second  time,  the  Episcopate  was  open  to  me.  But 
after  those  early  years  were  over,  so  was  all  chance  of  the  Epis- 
copate for  me.1 

At  the  time  I  had,  of  course,  no  choice  as  to  what  was  my 
duty.  In  later  years,  I  would  have  accepted  the  Episcopate, 
if  for  one  reason  only,  namely:  the  opportunity  it  offers  in  our 
church  to  a  Bishop  who  refuses  to  be  a  slave  to  modern  pre- 
cedent (I  say  modern  advisedly),  to  gather  round  him  and  to 
ordain  men  he  believes  to  have  been  called  of  God  to  preach  the 
Gospel.  This  immense  power  is  part  of  the  unused  and  so 
decaying  treasure  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church:  her 
talent,  laid  away  in  a  most  correctly  embroidered  and  folded 
ecclesiastical  napkin,  and  not  put  out  to  interest,  as  the  Master 
demanded  that  it  should  be.     (See  Matt,  xxv,  25-26.) 

I  said  that  the  lesson  I  had  learned  in  Toronto  I  practised  in 
New  York.  I  resolutely  tried  never  to  "hedge."  Let  me  ex- 
plain that  in  saying  this  I  do  not  mean  that  I  took  an  ag- 
gressive, denunciatory  attitude  as  to  doctrines  I  believed  to  be 
outworn  or  false.  Rather  did  I  try  to  present  the  old  doctrines 
in  such  a  way  as  to  commend,  if  not  their  form,  yet  surely  their 
meaning  and  purpose  and  spirit,  to  men's  conscience.  For  I 
do  not  believe  that  any  old  doctrine,  however  crude  and  even 
cruel  it  sounds  in  our  ears  to-day,  but  has  some  moral  sanction, 
some  far-away  spiritual  truth  behind  it,  that  gave  it  the  vital 
energy  necessary  to  its  survival. 

^ere  I  find  I  am  mistaken/ there  was  a  movement  to  induce  me  to  allow  my  name  to  be 
presented  in  Colorado  several  years  later. 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  261 

Nothing  is  ever  lost,  and  much  may  be  gained,  if  such  are 
dealt  with  reverently,  as  costly  things;  consecrated  by  the  blood 
and  tears  of  those  who  formulated  them  and  fought  for  them — 
the  signals,  watchwords,  battle  cries  by  which  they  had 
marched  and  fought  and  conquered.  Title  deeds  to  our  spiri- 
tual estate,  to  be  remembered  and  honoured,  not  forgotten. 
Fine  metal  in  them,  worthy  of  recasting;  eternal  truth  in  them, 
worthy  of  restating.  But  if  they  are  to  help  and  not  hinder  us 
to-day,  if  they  are  to  inspire  our  vision,  not  blind  and  confine  it 
then  restated  and  recast  they  most  certainly  must  be. 

The  banian  tree's  down-thrusting  branches  root  themselves 
slowly,  firmly,  round  the  parent  stem.  After  a  long  time, 
the  central  stem  decays,  but  its  function  well  done,  its  children 
prolong  its  life  forever.  So  with  our  dear  old  beliefs.  We  owe 
all  to  them,  we  are  what  we  are  because  of  them.  Yet  in  their 
former  shape  they  exist  for  us  no  longer. 

I  have  outlined  some  of  those  things  we  did  that  were  worth 
while  in  my  first  six  years  at  St.  George's,  and  I  dwell  on  this 
quality  in  my  preaching  because  I  believe  that  in  it  chiefly  lay 
what  value  my  preaching  had.  I  tried  to  do  as  well  as  I  could, 
with  such  faulty  educational  and  mental  outfit  as  I  possessed, 
what  most  of  the  clergy  were  afraid  to  attempt  at  all.  I  tried, 
and  kept  trying,  to  recast,  to  restate,  the  church's  orthodox 
doctrines.  For  such  restatement  intelligent  lay  people  were 
everywhere  hungry,  and  to  satisfy  that  hunger  I  did  my  poor 
best.  It  was  this  quality  in  my  preaching,  more  than  any 
other,  that  drew  to  me  my  people.  Of  this  I  had  constant 
proof. 

The  cultured  laity  are  not  giving  up  religion,  though  of  this 
they  are  often  accused.  But  they  are  ceasing  to  look  to  the 
churches  for  it.  There  is  a  real  danger  that  public  worship 
may  be  left  to  the  uneducated,  to  women,  clergymen,  and  re- 
ligious cranks. 

In  another  chapter  I  will  write  more  fully  of  the  changes  my 
theology  was  undergoing,  and  of  the  effect  these  changes, 
frankly  confessed  from  the  pulpit  by  me,  had  on  my  hearers. 
I  can  best  illustrate  my  position  with  my  people  by  here  quot- 
ing a  very  few  of  the  large  number  of  letters  I  received  at  this 
time  from  regular  attendants  at  my  church.  I  have  just  named 
one,  a  man  of  weight  and  influence,  who  felt  obliged  to  leave  us. 


262  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

The  writers  of  some  of  these  letters  I  cannot  name,  for  reasons 
that  are  obvious,  but  for  one  letter  of  withdrawal  I  had  scores 
written  in  the  spirit  of  the  following. 

The  extraordinary  experience  told  in  the  first  of  these  would 
in  other  days  have  been  claimed  as  miraculous.  In  every 
particular,  it  is  the  statement  of  things  as  they  occurred.  The 
writer  was  a  well-known  citizen  of  New  York,  honoured  in  his 
profession,  loved  by  all  who  knew  him:  a  sober-minded  Chris- 
tian gentleman.  His  letter  shows  what  an  act  of  Faith  can 
accomplish.  The  second  letter,  so  touchingly,  bravely  beauti- 
ful, speaks  for  itself,  and  for  many  another  soul  who  found 
"daily  bread"  with  us. 

These  letters  were  written  about  the  time  of  my  return  to 
my  pulpit,  after  my  first  breakdown. 

You  will  be  very  much  interested  in  knowing  that  your  sermon  last 
Sunday  produced  a  wonderful  effect  upon  a  man  who,  with  the  exception  of 
Sunday,  February  ioth,  had  not  been  inside  a  church  for  twenty-five  years. 

If  it  were  not  for  a  most  extraordinary  circumstance,  that  you  really  ought 
to  know,  I  would  not  tell  the  story,  because  it  looks  so  much  like  self-glorifi- 
cation; and  as  my  own  heart  is  full  of  thankfulness,  I  may  write  in  too  egotisti- 
cal a  manner. 

Four  Sundays  ago  I  was  teaching  my  class  in  Sunday  School  the  lesson  of 
the  man  stricken  with  the  palsy,  whose  friends  brought  him  to  Jesus.  I 
told  them  that  no  one  living  was  so  wicked  that  Jesus  would  reject  him, 
if  he  went  to  Jesus  as  this  man  went,  taken  by  his  friends.  And  as  I  made 
the  statement  I  stopped  a  moment  to  think  whether  I  really  meant  what  I 
said,  and  if  it  was  really  true;  and  if  so,  why  did  I  not  make  an  effort  to  bring 
my  eldest  brother  to  a  realizing  sense  of  what  Jesus  could  do  for  him. 

My  brother  has  been  the  black  sheep  of  the  family  through  drink,  and  his 
mental  and  moral  condition  was  as  bad  as  words  can  describe.  In  your 
sermon  that  Sunday,  you  said  that  if  God  created,  He  must  redeem  or  He  is 
no  Father  of  men;  and  you  asked  those  present  to  go  among  those  they  knew, 
or  even  those  whom  they  did  not  know,  and  bring  them  to  divine  service. 

Then  the  thought  came  to  me  again,  "How  absurd  for  me  to  ask  a  stranger 
to  come  with  me,  when  I  do  not  ask  my  own  brother."  The  rest  of  that  day 
was  one  of  great  mental  excitement,  and  although  my  brother  was  living  five 
hundred  miles  away,  I  determined  to  go  at  once  to  him,  and  see  what  I  could 
do  in  the  direction  indicated  in  the  Sunday-school  lesson. 

I  wrote  to  his  wife  I  was  coming,  and  then  started.  His  wife  telegraphed 
me  not  to  come  on  any  account,  and  followed  it  up  with  a  letter  assuring  me 
of  the  utter  hopelessness  of  my  doing  any  good.  Thank  God,  I  had  already 
started  and  did  not  receive  them  until  my  return. 

I  got  there  and  found  him  sober  for  the  first  time  in  a  long  while.  I  told 
him  my  story,  and  told  him  of  the  Sunday-school  lesson — that  it  was  the 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  263 

man's  friends  who  took  him  to  Jesus.  That  it  was  their  love  and'  faith 
that  made  them  act  as  they  did.  Because  of  their  act  his  sins  were  forgiven 
and  he  was  cured. 

I  cannot  tell  you  all  that  occurred,  but  hasten  on  to  the  point.  I  brought 
him  to  New  York,  took  him  to  my  own  house,  clothed  him  with  the  best, 
treated  him  as  I  would  the  most  loving  friend  I  had.  And  then  on  Sunday 
last  took  him  to  your  church.  When  you  gave  out  your  text,  "The  man 
whose  friends  brought  him  to  Jesus,"  in  my  astonishment  at  the  coincidence 
I  exclaimed,  "It  is  marvellous,"  so  that  those  around  me  heard,  and  the 
effect  on  my  brother  (after  being  assured  that  there  was  no  collusion  between 
us)  was  stupendous.  Being  an  agnostic,  he  was  superstitious,  and  the  sudden 
visit,  the  sudden  change  of  living,  and  your  sermon,  have  done  a  work  whose 
effects  will,  I  think,  never  be  effaced. 

I  have  sent  him  on  a  sailing  ship  to  Australia,  and  his  wife  declares  that  the 
change  in  the  man  is  as  great  a  miracle  as  was  the  case  of  the  man  with  the 
palsy. 

I  have  not  told  you  all  the  things  that  were  said  and  done,  because  every- 
thing cannot  be  written. 

Affectionately  yours, 


No,  the  days  of  miracles  are  not  over;  only  be  it  remembered 
that  miracles  are  not  supernatural  happenings,  things  we  over- 
persuade  God  to  do  for  a  favoured  few.  They  are  the  exercise 
of  the  divine  powers  slowly  growing  to  fulfillment  in  man  him- 
self; powers  Jesus  thought  of  when  he  said,  in  his  parting  words 
to  his  disciples:  "And  greater  works  than  mine  shall  ye  do  be- 
cause I  go  to  the  Father."     (John  xiv,  12.) 

I  remember  that  exclamation.  In  the  silence  of  the  church 
it  came  to  me  distinctly,  from  my  friend's  seat  under  the 
gallery  on  my  left  hand. 

Would  you  admit  as  a  communicant  one  who  cannot  honestly  subscribe 
to  the  Apostles'  Creed?  I  worship  a  divine  Christ,  yet  am  hampered  by  an 
awful  doubt  that  he  may  have  been  disappointed  in  his  Father,  when,  for  the 
sake  of  what  he  conceived  his  Father  to  be,  He 

"  Struck  singly  out,  and  dashed  against  the  rocks." 

Did  he  find  His  God  beyond  the  grave? 

I  was  born  and  nurtured  under  sweet  church  influences  whose  memories 
still  hold  my  deepest  affection,  and  I  am  a  widow  forty-seven  years  old. 

Life  and  critical  reading  led  me  to  Unitarianism.  Bitter,  tragic,  despair- 
ing sorrow  brought  me  to  feel  only  "God,  if  there  be  a  God,  have  mercy  on 
my  soul — if  I  have  a  soul  immortal."  Ethical  culture  seemed  the  best  that 
remained,  until  it  was  condemned  out  of  its  own  mouth,  to  my  mind  through 
the  confession  of  one  of  its  choicest  spirits,  "that  it  is  only  a  sect  among 
sects,  making  Popes  of  its  teachers." 


264  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Then  I  knew  I  loved  the  Lord  Jesus,  and  could  not  side  with  those  who  dis- 
honour Him  and  disown  Him,  from  Whom  they  get  all  the  light  they  have 
to  work  by:  who  ridicule  the  gropings  of  the  past  after  God,  as  though  wis- 
dom were  just  born. 

Close  upon  this,  as  I  drifted  homeless,  hopeless,  sore  bestead,  I  "happened" 
to  attend  at  St.  George's  the  first  Good  Friday  Passion  Service  I  had  ever 
heard. 

The  religious  experience  of  a  lifetime  was  concentrated  in  those  three 
hours.  Every  word  probed  to  the  depths  of  my  being,  and  answered  to 
my  own  experience  of  life  and  longings  of  soul.  I  never  knew  the  Lord 
Jesus  till  then.     Henceforth,  I  cannot  live  without  Him. 

If  in  my  mortal  heart-break  and  alone-ness,  weighted  with  heavy  re- 
sponsibilities concerning  my  children,  which  I  must  carry  yet  cannot  meet, 
I  have  finally  put  my  trust  in  a  beautiful  dream — "Here  I  stand.  I  cannot 
do  other.     God  help  me." 

Pardon  my  intrusion  on  your  valuable  time,  and  whether  you  admit 
me  or  not,  accept  the  gratitude  of  one  more  soul,  lifted  by  your  words  into 
new  and  hopeful  living,  through  glimpses,  at  least,  of  the  mind  of  Christ. 

During  these  years,  the  tragic  dualism  of  our  nature  grew 
clearer  to  me — its  beast  inheritance  and  its  divine  possession. 
In  my  preaching,  I  constantly  emphasized  it — Man 

A  cripple  of  God,  half  true,  half  formed, 
And  by  great  sparks  Promethean  warmed — 

his  salvation  a  slow  business,  yet  an  assured  business,  since  the 
Promethean  spark  is  inextinguishable.  Man  rising  out  of  the 
beast  man  into  the  God  man.  Out  of  the  first  Adam  man 
(for  Paul  and  Darwin  are  finely  agreed)  into  the  second  Adam 
man. 

I  found  that  my  own  beliefs,  however  imperfect  and  un- 
satisfactory, had  yet  always  had,  from  boyhood  up,  enough  real 
life  in  them  to  allow  of  growth  and  development.  If  I  found 
I  had  to  give  up  some  things,  some  cherished  opinion,  those  I 
ministered  to  were  in  just  the  same  state  of  mental  flux  as  I  was; 
and  the  struggle  I  was  going  through  for  my  faith  was  just  the 
experience  that  enabled  me  to  strengthen  and  establish  their 
faith;  and  that  in  this  lay  the  mystic  power  of  man's  influence 
over  man. 

The  real  preacher  is  a  little  ahead  of  his  flock.  If  he  is  not 
a  little  ahead,  he  is  no  guide.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  he  is  too 
far  ahead,  then  is  he  also  no  guide;  he  is  lost  to  his  following  in 
the  mist. 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  265 

After  that  Ash  Wednesday  afternoon  it  was  many  months 
berore  I  entered  my  pulpit  again.  The  doctors  ordered  me 
complete  rest  and  change.  For  six  months  no  church  news  of 
any  sort  whatever  reached  me.  I  was  not  even  allowed  to  read 
the  printed  report  of  the  year's  work,  when  our  year-book  came 
out.  Then  it  was  I  proved  fortunate  in  my  friends.  I  had 
no  care.  Others  planned  my  life  and  saved  me  all  expense  and 
all  trouble.  Of  course  the  strongest  arm  under  me  was  that  of 
my  senior  warden.  He  was  ever  a  man  to  lean  on  in  time  of 
trouble.  You  differed  with  him,  and  he  with  you,  but  when 
a  helper  was  needed,  you  turned  to  him,  you  leaned  on  him, 
and  you  leaned  hard.  He  had  a  great  heart,  had  my  senior 
warden,  J.  Pierpont  Morgan. 

Junius  Morgan,  a  nephew  of  J.  P.  Morgan,  was  my  most 
kind  and  cheery  companion  during  the  first  dark  months  of  that 
time;  and  great  is  the  debt  I  owe  to  him.  To  help  me  and  save 
me  from  darkness,  he  gave  up  his  work  and  his  friends  for  the 
time  being.  It  took  no  small  self-denial  to  watch  and  care  for 
me,  depressed  in  mind  and  weakened  in  body  as  I  was,  but  he 
travelled  with  me  for  months,  till  I  was  almost  my  own  man 
once  more. 

Thus  wisely  and  completely  was  I  eliminated.  So  far  so 
good,  but  what  of  the  church?  There  was  no  denying  that 
church  and  people  were  facing  a  trying  time.  How  splendidly 
they  came  through,  and  why  they  came  through  as  they  did, 
I  must  try  to  tell. 

Each  Sunday  morning  there  met  at  the  church  door  a  little 
group  of  men.  Some  were  there  quite  half  an  hour  before 
service  began.  Some  joined  the  company  a  little  later.  The 
group  is  worth  looking  at,  for  those  composing  it  represent 
what  St.  George's  is  standing  for;  what  it  has  done  and  is  trying 
to  do.  The  rector  is  away;  when  he  may  return  is  uncertain. 
These  men  are  holding  together  things  as  he  left  them.  St. 
George's  is  their  church;  they  have  had  great  part  in  making  it 
what  it  is,  and  if  they  were  regular  in  attendance,  and  liberal 
in  their  offerings,  and  dependable  in  the  various  services  they 
rendered,  while  things  were  running  smoothly,  it  is  doubly  im- 
portant that  they  should  not  fail  now.     And  so  they  do  not  fail. 

They  are  standing  for  great  principles.  They  are  undis- 
turbed by  divisions  or  jealousies.     They   are  practising,   as 


266  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

they  meet  at  the  church  door,  what  was  from  the  pulpit 
preached:  a  welcome  to  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men. 

Prominent  in  that  group  are  J.  Pierpont  Morgan  and  J.  Noble 
Stearns,  the  vestrymen.  All  attendants  at  the  church  know 
these  men  by  sight,  and  as  they  stand  welcoming  all  who  come, 
they  represent  a  large  band;  a  band  made  up  of  the  known  and 
unknown,  of  the  rich  and  the  poor,  who,  one  and  all,  are  in  their 
own  places  keeping  up  steadily  the  work  to  which  they  believe 
themselves  called,  and  to  which  they  had  been  appointed. 

While  I  was  away  from  my  people,  the  parish  life  went  on 
regularly  and  prosperously,  undisturbed  by  divisions  or  jeal- 
ousies or  any  breath  of  strife.  I  walked  into  the  Sunday 
School  in  our  new  parish  house,  unannounced  and  quite  unex- 
pected, one  Sunday  morning  in  the  December  following  my 
illness.  There  were  present,  by  actual  count,  more  than  eleven 
hundred  children,  and  of  the  band  of  teachers,  then  numbering 
one  hundred  and  twelve,  just  two  were  absent. 

From  top  to  bottom  in  all  our  organizations  this  was  the 
sort  of  service  rendered  by  my  people  during  my  long  absence. 
From  the  wardens  down,  no  one  failed  to  do  what  he  or  she 
had  undertaken.  This  was  in  a  church,  remember,  where  no 
one  owned  or  rented  a  seat. 

William  Foulke  was  in  that  Sunday  morning  group,  and  to 
him  and  William  H.  SchiefTelin  fell  the  very  delicate  duty  of 
convincing  the  heterogeneous  mass  that  crowded  the  church 
on  Sundays  that  one  and  all  of  them  were  welcome,  and  yet 
that  our  welcome  did  not  necessarily  include  the  right  for  each 
of  the  visitors  to  select  just  such  a  seat  as  pleased  him  best. 

In  that  group,  too,  stood  William  Chester,  my  organist — 
young  and  tall  and  fair  and  handsome,  an  enthusiastic  musi- 
cian, and,  unlike  many  who  have  a  genius  for  music,  not  hard 
for  a  non-musical  or  semi-musical  man  like  myself  to  get  on  with. 
Chester  grasped  my  ideas  of  the  relation  I  strove  for  between 
the  free  church  and  the  choir,  and  most  loyally  and  ably,  for 
many  years  till  his  death,  he  did  what  in  him  lay  to  give  effect 
to  them. 

He  drew  his  choir  of  volunteers  round  him  and  made  them 
his  loving  friends;  and,  what  was  much  harder,  as  all  who  have 
had  choir  experience  will  admit,  loving  friends  to  each  other.  I 
can  only  recall,  in  all  those  years,  one  serious  commotion  in  my 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  267 

white-robed  company.  That  was  on  the  memorable  occasion 
when,  without  warning  (for  this  course  I  thought  the  wisest), 
I  broke  the  news  to  them  that  I  was  going  to  have  for  soloist  a 
Negro,  Harry  Burleigh.  Then  division,  consternation,  con- 
fusion, and  protest  reigned  for  a  time.  I  never  knew  how  the 
troubled  waters  settled  down.  Indeed,  I  carefully  avoided 
knowing  who  was  for  and  who  against  my  revolutionary  ar- 
rangement. Nothing  like  it  had  ever  been  known  in  the 
church's  musical  history.  The  thing  was  arranged  and  I  gave 
no  opportunity  for  its  discussion.  When  the  question  is  one 
of  church  policy,  I  held,  and  hold,  that  the  decision  lies  with  the 
rector  and  with  none  other.  Some  one  man  must  command. 
Popular  vote  should  be  able  to  displace  incapable  command; 
it  can  do  so  in  all  Protestant  churches  except  ours;  but  no  vote 
should  be  able  to  halt  an  order. 

To  my  friend  Daniel  G.  Elliot  I  owed  much.  At  choir  meet- 
ings he  seldom  spoke,  but  from  them  he  never  was  absent,  and 
he  set  a  standard  of  courtesy  and  loyalty  that  was  not  without 
influence  on  each  one  of  its  ninety-one  members. 

Well,  my  choir  held  together!  I  don't  think  I  lost  a  member 
of  it,  even  if  I  forced  into  it  a  black  brother.  And  oh!  how 
glad  I  and  the  choir  were  afterward  that  I  had  acted  as  I  did. 
That  was  many  years  ago,  and  very,  very  many  of  the  dear 
friends  who  helped  so  effectively  to  lead  and  inspire  their 
fellow-worshippers  then  can  no  longer  take  their  place  in  any 
earthly  choir.  But  Harry  Burleigh's  sweet  baritone  voice, 
worn  a  little,  it  may  be,  still  leads  the  choir  which  he  entered 
against  much  protest  then;  and  St.  George's  is  proud  of  him, 
proud  of  what  he  has  accomplished  as  a  musician,  and  loves 
and  honours  him  for  what  he  has  proved  himself  to  be  as  a 
Christian  man. 

Of  one  more,  an  inconspicuous  figure  in  that  group  at  the 
church  door,  I  must  write  before  I  close  the  chapter  on  our 
time  of  testing.  As  you  looked  at  him,  there  was  nothing 
especially  distinguishing  in  the  appearance  of  John  Reichert — 
a  short,  rather  stocky  figure,  suggestive  of  Germany. 

In  1883,  Lindsay  Parker  said  to  me  one  day,  "I  have  got 
hold  of  an  unusual  sort  of  boy  to  black  our  boots  and  do  odd 
jobs  round  the  clergy  house."  We  had  to  save  the  pennies  then, 
and  I  had  to  provide  them,  so  I  said:  "What  are  you  paying 


268  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

him?"  "Three  fifty  a  week/'  said  he,  "and  he  will  soon  be 
worth  more."  Two  or  three  days  before,  a  hungry,  weather- 
beaten  boy,  almost  sunk  into  the  ranks  of  trampdom,  as  he 
told  me  afterward,  knocked  at  the  clergy-house  door  in  East 
17th  Street  and  asked  for  work.  John  Reichert's  story  can  be 
duplicated  in  many  cities  of  our  land,  but  it  can  never  be  told 
too  often.  Of  his  life  in  Germany  I  know  nothing,  nor  have  I 
ever  asked  him  about  it.  When  he  came  to  us  he  presented 
to  Lindsay  Parker  his  credentials — a  passport  with  an  attach- 
ment stating  that  he  was  a  sailor  on  the  bark  Astronom^  sailing 
from  Hamburg  in  1883 — the  trip  lasting  over  ninety  days. 
After  being  twenty-five  years  in  this  country  he  made  several 
trips  to  Europe,  but  no  visits  to  his  home — touching  Germany 
only  on  the  western  frontier,  so  I  fancy  his  trouble  was  military. 
When  he  landed  in  New  York,  times  were  very  hard,  and  try 
as  he  would  he  could  get  no  work.  He  had  a  German  school- 
boy's knowledge  of  English,  speaking  it  a  little,  with  a  very 
foreign  accent.  Soon  what  little  money  he  had  was  gone,  and 
he  slept  where  he  could,  and  begged  what  he  ate.  When  the 
clergy-house  door  opened  to  him,  he  had  been  sleeping  for  three 
weeks  in  one  of  the  ice  wagons  that  stood  in  those  days,  for  re- 
pairs, on  a  downtown  pier  of  the  North  River.  It  was  Novem- 
ber, and  nights  were  cold.  John  Reichert  has  often  told  me  of 
those  experiences  of  his,  and  some  of  the  poor  fellows  who 
shared  them  with  him;  and  he  always  declared  that  he  could 
well  understand  how  easily,  under  such  circumstances,  a  would- 
be  honest  man  became  a  "bum." 

"I  had  done  my  very  best,"  said  he.  "I  had  called  on 
every  German  organization  I  knew  of  or  could  learn  of.  I  had 
knocked  at  thousands  of  doors.  I  never  asked  for  money;  I 
always  asked  for  work,  but  pitiful  people  gave  me  food  often, 
and  offered  me  clothes  sometimes;  and  gradually  I  found  that 
even  in  an  open  wagon  on  the  river  side  the  cold  did  not  prevent 
my  sleeping  at  night.  I  could  live,  somehow,  at  the  very  worst. 
I  could  live  off  the  city.  I  was  slowly  but  surely  sinking  to  that 
point  where  I  could  be  contented  so  to  live,  since  I  had  done 
all  a  man  could  do,  and  no  other  sort  of  life  was  possible  to  me. 
Once  to  sink  to  the  point  of  accepting  as  inevitable  such  a  life 
is  to  be  a  'lost  bum.'  I  almost  became  a  bum.  I  understand 
how  the  bum  is  made." 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  269 

John  Reichert  told  me  this  story  thirty-seven  years  ago,  and 
since  the  days  he  spoke  of  he  and  I  have,  one  way  or  another, 
had  a  good  deal  to  do  with  poor  beaten  folk,  of  whose  number 
he  had  so  narrowly  escaped  being  one.  But  a  keener,  kinder 
helper  bums  never  had  than  he.  When  I  crossed  the  threshold 
of  St.  George's  Church,  I  determined  I  would  reach  the  poor 
people,  the  defeated  people  round  me,  or  I  would  give  up  the 
ministry.  If  this  resolution  had  brought  me  nothing  more  than 
the  friendship  of  John  Reichert  and  the  assistance  he  and 
those  he  drew  round  him  were  to  give  to  St.  George's,  I  would 
not  have  failed  as  its  rector. 

We  had  gone  to  the  East  Side,  and  the  East  Side  had  come 
to  us.  Why?  Because  we  had  spoken  in  terms  it  could  under- 
stand. The  people  of  the  East  Side  knew  me  by  sight  and  re- 
pute. This  was  natural,  but  I  was  not  one  of  themselves. 
They  did  not  know  or  care  much  about  my  vestry.  What 
they  did  know  did  not  impress  them.  They  were  accustomed 
to  the  idea  that  rich  men  were  all-powerful  in  all  churches, 
perhaps  excepting  the  Roman  Catholic,  and  that  was  one  of  the 
reasons  why  they  kept  away  from  the  churches.  Mr.  J.  Pier- 
pont  Morgan's  name  they  knew,  as  did  all  New  York,  but 
great  names  made  as  small  impression  on  the  packed  masses  of 
lower  New  York  then  as  they  do  on  Greater  New  York  to-day. 
A  man  like  John  Reichert  was  a  very  different  proposition.  He 
went  day  by  day,  hour  by  hour,  in  and  out  of  the  crowded 
houses  where  our  young  people  slept  (I  can't  say  lived).  He 
spoke  their  German  tongue,  and  did  more  to  make  them  feel 
that  the  old  church  really  cared  for  them  than  did  all  the  ser- 
mons we  preached  on  the  street,  or  the  dinners  and  teas  and 
clothes  the  ladies  gave  at  the  mission. 

Moreover,  John  Reichert  soon  drew  round  him  his  kind. 

He  did  not  long  walk  alone.  As  the  full  and  happy  years  of 
my  life  rolled  by,  I  was  blessed  and  helped  by  many  friends  and 
assistants.  Few  have  been  as  fortunate;  but  not  to  any  one  of 
them  do  I  owe  as  great  a  debt  as  to  that  friendless  German  boy 
who  came  knocking  at  the  clergy-house  door  in  1883.  To  me 
he  became  eyes  and  ears.  He  saw  what  I  could  not  see.  He 
heard  the  things  I  wanted  to  hear.  And,  oh,  so  often,  when, 
owing  to  my  impetuous  tongue  and  temper,  I  hurt  people's 
feelings  or  was  too  harsh  in  my  judgment  of  individuals,  John 


270  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Reichert  would  lay  facts  before  me  that  I  had  not  known  or  had 
forgotten,  and  wisely  pour  a  little  kindly  oil  on  some  heated 
"bearing"  in  life.  My  memory  was  bad;  his  never  seemed  to 
fail  him.  I  could  rely  on  it  always.  He  knew  everyone,  and 
more  about  each  and  all  of  them  than  all  the  clergy  put  to- 
gether. Yet  he  never  was  known  to  gossip.  How  such  multi- 
farious information  ever  got  into  John  Reichert  and  never, 
except  to  me,  got  out  of  John  Reichert,  puzzled  me  then,  and 
puzzles  me  still.  Confidences  he  had  beyond  number,  and 
yet  he  never  was  known  to  give  any  one  away. 

John  Reichert  became  a  quite  admirable  secretary,  first  to 
me,  afterward  to  the  vestry  as  well;  and  Mr.  Morgan  often 
said  he  was  worth  15,000  a  year.  "If  you  let  him  go,"  said  Mr. 
Morgan,  "he  may  call  at  23  Wall  Street  at  once."  My  as- 
sistant clergy  got  in  the  habit  of  consulting  him.  Shy  of  a 
raw  German  lad  at  first,  they  soon  realized,  as  I  did,  his  value; 
and  the  truth  is  that  they  went  often  to  John  Reichert  for 
advice  as  to  what  had  best  be  done  in  a  matter  before  they  came 
to  me.  Needless  to  say,  I  encouraged  the  habit,  and  a  certain 
German  beer-garden  round  the  corner  of  Third  Avenue  (be  char- 
itable, dear  reader;  we  had  not  passed  the  Eighteenth  Amend- 
ment then,  and  John  Reichert  was  not  so  long  over  from  Ger- 
many) witnessed  many  an  innocent  and  merry  consultation 
when  the  day's  work  was  done,  that  was  none  the  less  truly 
Christian  because  it  was  had  in  an  atmosphere  of  tobacco 
smoke,  and  the  councillors  drank  moderately  of  good  German 
brown  beer. 

Man  after  man  of  those  "boys"  of  mine,  after  they  left  me, 
or  when  they  spoke  at  leaving  of  what  the  church  had  been  to 
them,  in  words  strangely  similar,  would  say  they  thanked  God 
that  they  had  known  John  Reichert,  and  they  were  the  better 
able  to  minister  to  their  fellows  because  they  knew  him. 

It  was  part  of  my  plan  to  have  my  laity  help  train  and 
develop  what  was  best  in  my  assistants,  and  to  get  rid  of  what 
was  worst  in  them:  Seminary  product  often,  the  mannerisms 
and  affectations,  mental,  moral,  and  physical,  which  so  com- 
monly afflict  and  limit  the  clergy.  Contact  with  John  Reichert, 
not  excluding  the  quiet  beer-garden  he  favoured,  was  very 
effective. 

I  took  chances  when  I  engaged  Henry  Wilson  and  Lindsay 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  271 

Parker  as  my  first  clerical  assistants.  The  result  of  my  chance 
taking  I  have  told.  I  have  referred  to  a  third  chance  I  took 
the  same  year.  In  it  I  had  again  good  fortune.  I  handed  over 
my  scheme  for  summer  seaside  work  entirely  to  Doctor  and 
Mrs.  Miles.  They  asked  me  for  John  Reichert  and  so  John 
left  the  boots  and  other  sundry  jobs  for  good,  and  under  Mrs. 
Miles's  quite  extraordinarily  capable  instruction  learned  to 
handle  railroad  people,  ferry  boats,  and  from  twelve  to  sixteen 
thousand  people  in  the  summer.  Mrs.  Miles's  energy  and 
force  of  character  was  wonderful.  Doctor  Miles  was  her  faith- 
ful and  competent  echo.  She  had  only  one  limitation — an 
occasionally  impossible  temper.  But  John  Reichert  says  his 
debt  to  her  is  great.  I  left  this  first  summer  appeal  of  mine  to 
the  mothers  and  children  of  the  East  Side  entirely  to  Doctor 
'and  Mrs.  Miles.  I  told  them  what  money  I  had  to  spend,  and 
bade  them  do  the  best  they  could  with  it.  And  they  certainly 
accomplished  marvels.  The  plans  they  made  then  we  worked 
on,  virtually  without  change,  for  more  than  twenty-five  years. 
But  the  greatest  thing  they  did  was  "to  start"  John  Reichert. 

A  cheap  cottage  at  Rockaway  Beach  was  my  starting  point. 
Rockaway  was  easy  of  access;  its  beach  then  was  not  foul  as,  in 
later  years,  our  wasteful  methods  of  dumping  city  refuse  made 
it;  and  the  local  railroad  gave  us  reasonable  rates  and  facilities. 
We  had  our  own  reserved  cars,  running  daily  at  fixed  hours, 
and  for  many  years  we  drew  from  twelve  to  sixteen  thousand 
people  to  the  cooling  sea  for  the  day.  There  they  rested  and 
bathed  and  lunched  and  had  a  good  time;  and  six  hundred  who 
were  ailing,  or  had  sick  children,  we  fed  up  and  made  com- 
fortable for  a  week. 

In  church,  Sunday  School,  and  mission,  the  usual  hours  of 
service  did  not  change,  winter  or  summer.  During  the  heated 
term,  the  number  of  those  attending  naturally  fell  off.  But 
Rockaway  never  showed  signs  of  slackening,  and  instead  of 
finding  each  autumn  that  ties  with  your  people  had  to  be 
reknit,  we  found  that  the  summer  bettered  our  knowledge  of 
each  other,  and  strengthened  and  unified  our  parish  life. 

It  was  John  Reichert  who  built  up  Rockaway  work  from 
its  first  beginning  under  the  admirable  management  of  Doctor 
and  Mrs.  Miles.  My  young  clergy  gained  as  much  by  it  as 
did  those  they  went  there  to  serve  and  entertain.     They  got 


272  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

nearer  to  the  people;  they  learned  to  know  them  under  natural 
conditions. 

Charles  Scadding,  afterward  Bishop  of  Oregon  (he  died  in 
1914),  in  a  report  he  made  to  me  in  1887,  truly  and  cleverly 
draws  a  picture  well  worthy  of  study.     Said  he : 

A  clergyman  visits  a  family  in  a  tenement  house.  If  they  are  under  the 
ministration  of  St.  George's,  they  will  probably  be  found  in  the  rear  house, 
top  floor  back.  He  enters,  finds  the  mother  bending  over  her  wash- 
tub,  three  or  four  children  playing  or  quarrelling  on  a  dirty  floor,  and  as  many 
more  eating  at  a  side  table  not  much  cleaner.  Everything  is  in  confusion, 
and  the  clergyman  concludes  that  it  would  be  more  Christian  to  offer  to 
assist  in  the  washing,  or  to  relieve  the  tired  mother  for  a  few  hours  of  the 
worry  of  the  children,  than  to  suggest  the  reading  of  the  Scripture  or 
family  prayers.  Not  being  prepared  to  do  the  former,  he  withdraws,  feeling 
that  his  pastoral  call  has  been  more  or  less  unsuccessful.  Change  the  en- 
vironments and  all  is  different.  Invite  the  whole  family  to  spend  a  day 
at  Rockaway.  Give  the  children  a  wholesome  mid-day  meal  and  a  bath 
in  the  ocean,  and  while  this  is  going  on,  give  the  mother  one  of  the  com- 
fortable rocking  chairs  for  which  St.  George's  is  famous.  Let  the  clergyman 
now  approach  her.  She  has  forgotten  all  about  her  washtub.  She  is  no 
longer  awed  by  his  long  black  coat  and  high  hat.  She  sees  that  he  is  in  sea- 
sonable flannels,  that  he  is  interested  in  her  children,  and  she  becomes  at 
once  friendly  and  communicative,  and  in  ten  minutes  that  clergyman  knows 
more  about  her  home  life,  her  spiritual  condition,  the  dispositions  of  her 
children,  etc.,  etc.,  than  he  could  know  by  many  visits  to  her  in  her 
tenement  rooms.  Morally  and  spiritually,  then,  the  good  that  can  be  done 
by  this  seaside  work  is  incalculable.  The  physical  advantages  of  such  a  work 
are  so  excellent  and  so  evident  that  nothing  need  here  be  said  about  them. 

Scadding  might  have  added  that  the  clergy  and  deacon- 
esses welcomed  the  sea  breezes  and  the  kindly  company  as 
much  as  the  people  did.  And  white-faced  city  boys,  who  were 
taught  to  love  the  sea  and  brave  a  little  surf  in  bathing  suits 
by  young  parsons,  got  into  the  way  of  coming  of  a  week-day 
evening  or  Sunday  morning  to  Bible  or  confirmation  classes 
taught  by  these  same  young  men. 

There  are  many  ways  now  by  which  wage-earners  and  moth- 
ers with  little  children  can  get  away  from  the  stifling  city 
heat  in  summer.  It  was  not  so  then.  I  am  proud  to  think 
that  we  helped  to  show  what  could  and  should  be  done;  and  it 
was  a  German  lad  who  had  almost  sunk  to  the  ranks  of  the  lost, 
whose  ability,  resourcefulness,  faithfulness,  and  character  en- 
abled the  church  to  lead  the  way  in  this  new  field. 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  273 

I  have  tried  to  tell  in  part  what  one  stranger  in  our  land  did 
for  thousands.  What  a  blessing  one  German  boy,  saved,  and 
barely  saved,  from  shipwreck,  became  to  St.  George's  and  to 
me.  It  is  the  story  of  one  youth's  Americanization;  not  a  sud- 
den work  by  any  means,  for  nationhood  is  too  toughly  rooted 
a  plant  for  sudden  change.  (The  great  war  should  have  taught 
us  that.)  John  Reichert  and  I  have  some  points  of  difference 
still.  I  tell  him  he  is  only  half  a  democrat.  During  the  war 
he  threw  over  (very  gradually)  the  Kaiser,  but  I  never  could 
get  him  to  embrace  the  Allies. 

John  Reichert  is  not  one  to  be  "  blown  about  by  every  wind 
of  doctrine,"  not  even  when  the  doctrine  comes  from  one  he 
loves  and  admires.  Absolutely  truthful,  intensely,  intelli- 
gently industrious,  and,  once  his  intellect  has  been  convinced 
and  his  confidence  won,  unswervingly  loyal,  John  Reichert 
seems  to  me  to  embody  what  is  finest  in  those  national  qualities 
that  won  for  the  German  fatherland  a  foremost  place  among 
the  nations  before  that  fatal  day  in  August,  19 14. 

When  I  resigned  from  St.  George's,  it  was  by  many  deemed 
advisable  that  the  plans  and  machinery  of  an  Institutional 
Church  should  be  outlined  for  that  part  of  the  public  interested 
in  such  a  development.  My  friend,  the  Rev.  George  Hodges, 
Dean  of  the  Episcopal  Theological  School  at  Cambridge,  Massa- 
chusetts, and  John  Reichert  together  undertook  the  by  no 
means  easy  task  of  compilation  and  comment.  The  result 
was  a  handsome  volume  that  has  had  an  extended  circulation, 
not  in  the  United  States  alone,  but  also  in  Europe:  "The  Ad- 
ministration of  an  Institutional  Church."  The  book  was 
awarded  the  Diplome  de  Medaille  d'Or  at  Paris  in  1907  at  the 
Exposition  International  du  Livre.  To  this  work  Theodore 
Roosevelt  wrote  an  introduction.  Few  could  better  estimate 
than  could  he  what  I  had  aimed  to  do;  few  better  the  need  of 
doing  it. 

The  immigrant's  case  requires  something  more  than  alms 
or  even  friendly  greeting.  He  needs,  he  craves,  he  should  re- 
ceive, a  place  at  our  fireside,  a  welcome  to  our  home.  It  is 
evident  beyond  contradiction  that  the  prosperity  of  the  country 
and  the  advancement  of  the  whole  nation  depends  on  the  as- 
similation of  the  new  and  vigorous  blood  that  he  is  pouring 
into  its  veins.     Furthermore,  it  is  evident  that  prosperity  and 


274  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

progress  are  ours  in  so  far  as  this  is  accomplished.  We  are  not 
(for  all  the  ignorant  talk  to  the  contrary)1  receiving  a  poor 
quality  of  immigrant.  Taking  him  all  in  all,  he  represents  fine 
energy  and  purpose  and  capacity.  If  he  had  not  these  qualities, 
he  never  would  have  overcome  the  pains  and  penalties  that 
barred  his  adventurous  way  westward.  In  Ireland  or  Scan- 
dinavia, in  Germany  or  Czechoslovakia,  in  Italy  or  Russia,  the 
facts  are  the  same,  and  those  on  the  spot  and  who  know  bear 
similar  testimony.  These  countries  have  sent,  and  still  are 
sending  us,  a  great  deal  of  their  best. 

There  is  no  finer,  no  truer  definition  of  the  immigrant  spirit 
than  you  find  in  Genesis  xiii,  i,  2.  God's  voice  calls  on  the 
dissatisfied  Abram.  It  is  no  merely  human  spirit  of  push  and 
energy:  he  believes  that  it  is  a  divine  inspiration  that  bids  him 
leave  in  Ur  of  the  Chaldees  all  he  is  heir  to  and  seek  for  himself 
and  his  unborn  children  a  new  home — It  is  the  voice  of  God 
that  drives  him  forth  crying  "Get  thee  out  of  the  country — and 
I  will  make  of  thee  a  great  nation." 

We  believe  in  the  Pilgrims  of  the  past,  from  Abraham's 
time  till  the  sailing  of  the  Mayflower  in  1620.  Let  us  not  be  so 
blind,  so  infatuate,  as  to  forget  that  at  our  doors  to-day  are 
standing  the  pilgrims  of  a  later  time,  in  whose  souls  are  calling 
the  self-same  voice.  Our  own  national  destiny,  as  much  as 
theirs,  depends  on  our  wise  and  kindly  reception  of  them. 

Two  years  before  the  great  war,  I  landed  in  a  small  Dalma- 
tian port  where  some  mountain  folk  had  assembled  to  take 
ship  for  the  United  States.  I  saw  a  tall,  patriarchal  man  stand- 
ing on  the  old  stone  pier,  with  a  worn-looking  woman  and  small 
children  round  him.  All  they  owned  they  carried  in  a  few  poor 
bags.  The  immortal  story  of  the  pilgrim  from  Ur  came  to 
mind,  and  I  got  an  interpreter  and  approached  the  Albanian. 
"Why  do  you  leave  your  beautiful  country  and  take  this  long 
voyage  with  your  wife  and  small  children  across  the  sea?  You 
are  going  to  strange  people,  a  different  climate.  Have  you 
any  friends  in  America?" 

"I  have  none." 

"Why  are  you  going,  then,  so  far  from  home?" 

1Please  recall  the  fact  that  since  the  Immigration  tide  first  grew  to  large  proportions,  after 
the  Irish  Famine  in  the  early  middle  of  the  last  century,  the  cry  has  been  raised  as  against  the 
incomers  of  each  nation:    "They  are  flooding  our  land  with  the  ofF-scourings  of  Europe." 


TESTING  OF  MEN  AND  MEASURES  275 

"I  am  going  because  I  want  to  see  that  land  where  men  are 
free  and  all  have  a  chance." 

Thus  spoke  a  spirit  as  truly  divine  as  was  the  impulse  that 
fired  Abram's  resolve  four  thousand  years  before.  We  are 
blind  and  unbelieving  indeed  if  we  fancy  that  the  little  ships  of 
long  ago  held  nothing  but  what  was  of  human  promise,  and 
that  the  great  ships  of  to-day  hold  nothing  but  human  trash. 
There  are  clever  writers,  casual  observers,  who  say  so,  but  they 
are  wrong.  They  are  usually  those  hasty  critics  that  cannot 
visit  us  for  a  few  weeks  or  months  without  inflicting  on  us  a 
book.  The  spirit  of  purpose  and  adventure,  the  wistful, 
hungry,  hopeful  spirit,  is  the  same  in  all  the  ages,  so  far  as  we 
can  solve  history's  riddle.  The  passion  of  the  human  heart  for 
life,  and  yet  more  life,  and  freer  life,  is  the  same.  The  great 
words  of  the  Master  are  eternally  true:  "Man  cannot  live  by 
bread  alone,  but  by  every  word  of  God."  And  it  is  that  word 
that  in  all  ages  since  man  rose  from  the  beast  to  manhood,  has 
impelled,  has  inspired  the  child  of  man  to  the  Pilgrim's  Ad- 
venture. 

An  autobiography  is  not  the  place  for  an  essay  on  the  Amer- 
ican immigrant,  but  I  have  lived  long  enough  and  travelled  far 
enough  in  our  land  to  have  an  informed  opinion  of  the  process 
of  his  assimilation  during  the  last  forty-five  years.  I  have  seen 
the  change  in  the  thronging  crowd  of  my  own  East  Side  children, 
and  no  children  in  the  land  had  to  endure  a  more  discouraging 
reception  than  did  they.  I  speak  what  I  know  when  I  say  that 
there  are  nowhere  to-day  any  more  industrious,  intelligent,  and 
patriotic  citizens  in  the  United  States  than  are  those  children. 
They  have  more  than  made  good.  There  was  no  hyphenated 
Americanism  among  them  when  the  war  came.  They  live  no 
longer  in  lower  East  Side  New  York;  or  very  few  of  them  do. 
They  have  moved  into  healthier,  less  crowded,  more  prosper- 
ous neighbourhoods.  And  when  they  can  find  a  reasonable 
and  liberal  Protestant  Episcopal  Church — not  always  an  easy 
thing  to  do — they  will  join  it  and  work  in  it. 

It  must  always  be  so.  The  young  lead  the  old.  They  see 
what  older  eyes  cannot.  They  are  inspired  by  hopes  that  their 
parents  cannot  adjust  themselves  to.  I  have  watched  one 
generation  of  them,  and  am  convinced  of  the  truth  of  what  I 
say.     Give  the  children  half  a  chance,  and  they  will  not  only 


276  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

become  stalwart  Americans,  but  they  will  Americanize  their 
parents — Italians,  Swedes,  Slavs,  Jews,  Russians — so  much  is 
true  of  all. 

Unwillingly  I  bring  to  a  close  these  notes  of  mine  on  those 
early  testing  years,  and  on  some  of  the  good  things  and  good 
people  they  brought  to  me.  The  thing  that  troubles  me  to- 
day, as  I  look  over  the  field  of  Christian  endeavour,  is  the  utter 
failure  of  the  Protestant  churches  to  understand  and  help  the 
immigrant.  It  is  a  hard  and  unpopular  thing  for  an  Episco- 
palian to  say,  but  say  it  I  must,  for  it  is  the  truth.  There  is 
only  one  church  in  the  United  States  to-day  which  even  par- 
tially is  holding  its  own:1  that  is  the  Roman  Catholic  Church. 
One  reason  for  this  is,  she  succeeds  better  than  any  Protestant 
church  in  holding  the  immigrant. 

The  church  that  takes  in  the  stranger  will  live,  and  the 
churches  that  lose  him  will  wither. 


XI  am  not  ignorant  of  Church  statistics  presented  to  the  public.     They  are  misleading. 
There  are  three  sorts  of  lies:  Lies,  Damned  Lies,  and  Statistics. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

My  Senior  Warden 

For  like  a  child,  sent  with  a  flickering  light. 

To  fight  his  way  across  a  gusty  night, 
Man  walks  the  world.    Again  and  yet  again. 

The  light  must  be  by  gusts  of  passion  slain. 
But  shall  not  he  who  sent  him  from  the  door 

Relight  the  lamp  once  more  and  yet  once  more! 

— Omar  Khayyam. 

I  thought  my  people  and  my  work  would  hold  together, 
even  during  the  long  absence  that  followed  my  collapse  in  1889; 
but  what  I  found  when  I  returned  to  New  York  amazed  me. 
I  had  left  my  flock  scattered  in  many  corners  of  a  wide  field.  I 
found  it  drawn  closer  together. 

In  that  remarkable  band  that  held  things  together  one  man 
stood  forth.  Round  him,  while  its  membership  scarcely  knew 
it,  St.  George's  gathered,  and  when  with  absolute  regularity, 
Sunday  morning  by  Sunday  morning,  half  an  hour  or  more 
before  the  service  began,  Mr.  Morgan  stood  at  the  church 
door,  welcoming  those  he  knew  and  did  not  know,  church  mem- 
bers and  strangers  alike  felt  that  St.  George's,  without  a  rector, 
was  still  a  going  concern.  I  am  not  exaggerating  the  stimu- 
lating influence  of  my  senior  warden.  He  had  extraordinary 
powers  of  inspiration  and  encouragement  about  him  when 
he  chose  to  exercise  them. 

I  think  I  could  have  made  a  success  of  my  rectorate  in  any 
case.  The  time  was  ripe  for  what  I  attempted,  the  fields  stood 
ready  to  be  sown  and  reaped.  But  without  Pierpont  Morgan 
I  certainly  could  not  have  made  the  success  I  did;  and  seeing 
how  widely  different  in  many  important  matters  were  our 
views,  the  mighty  help  he  gave  me,  the  confidence  he  showed 
in  my  judgment,  are  matters  worth  dwelling  on.  It  would  be 
impossible  indeed  to  tell  my  life  story  and  leave  them  out. 

277 


278  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

The  time  to  write  his  life  has  not  yet  come.  Great  men  (and 
he  must  finally  be  numbered  among  the  great)  rouse  our  pas- 
sions; and  while  these  boil  within  us,  the  time  for  history  writ- 
ing is  not  yet.  But  of  some  things  about  him  I  must  write, 
for,  better  than  most,  I  knew  him,  and  I  loved  him,  and  what 
is  here  put  down  I  feel  very  sure  he  would  confirm  and  approve. 

First  I  mention  a  purely  personal  matter.  I  do  it  because  it 
seems  to  me  a  plain  duty  when  you  know  of  a  kind  good  thing 
done  to  tell  of  it,  to  pass  it  round.  If  our  faulty  nature  needs 
criticism,  let  us  give  it  praise  when  we  can  and  criticism  when 
we  must. 

I  was  never  again  as  strong  after  1889  as  I  had  been  before. 
I  did  not  show  it.  I  do  not  think  my  friends  noticed  it,  but  I 
knew  it.  I  had  lost  vitality  somehow.  Work  tired  me,  and 
preaching,  as  they  never  used  to.  I  could  not  sleep  as  well, 
nor  could  I  walk  as  far.  Mr.  Morgan  saw  most  things  he 
wanted  to  see,  and  he  noticed  the  change  in  me.  Soon  after 
my  return,  in  his  quiet  way,  he  drew  me  aside  one  day  and, 
slipping  a  paper  into  my  hand,  said:  "Don't  work  too 
hard;  you  ought  not  to  have  to  worry  about  money.  Don't 
thank  me,  and  don't  speak  of  it  to  any  one  but  your  wife."  He 
had  created  a  modest  trust  for  me  and  mine.  So  he  lifted  from 
my  shoulders  a  burden  that  has  crushed  the  life  out  of  many 
a  good  soldier;  worn  out  not  so  much  by  the  fighting,  as  by  the 
intolerable  weight  of  the  personal  pack  he  had  to  carry  in  the 
long  marches  between  and  after  his  battles. 

When  again  in  1902  I  was  much  run  down  in  health,  he  said 
to  Mrs.  Rainsford:  "He  cannot  do  much  longer  what  he  has 
been  doing.  You  have  not  a  home  of  your  own;  don't  you 
want  one?"  She  said  it  was  what  we  both  longed  for.  "Go 
and  build  it."  That  was  Pierpont  Morgan.  When  Mrs. 
Rainsford  lay  for  many  long  weeks  between  life  and  death  at 
Roosevelt  Hospital,  he,  who  at  that  time  was  carrying  a  load 
of  responsibility  heavier,  perhaps,  than  any  other  man  in  the 
United  States  carried,  except  its  President,  found  time  again 
and  again  to  bring  roses  to  her  sick  room,  and  would  wait  out- 
side her  door  till  the  nurse  permitted  him  to  lay  them  by  her 
bed.     That,  too,  was  Pierpont  Morgan. 

I  have  told  one  side  of  my  warden's  character.  I  will  now 
tell  of  another.     Both  went  to  make  the  man.     I  never  had  but 


MY  SENIOR  WARDEN  279 

one  serious  falling  out  with  Mr.  Morgan,  but  that  difference 
strained  for  a  time  the  relations  between  us.  Of  it  I  will  now 
speak.  J.  P.  Morgan,  if  a  democrat  in  theory,  was  sometimes 
an  autocrat  in  practice.  No  sane,  strong  man  is  always  con- 
sistent. Consistency  is  a  second-class  virtue.  He  would  have 
been  more  than  human  if  the  power  he  wielded,  and  the  adula- 
tion it  brought  to  him,  had  not  on  him  their  inevitable  result. 
He  grew  I  think  to  believe  that  as  the  rector  was  autocratic 
in  the  pulpit,  where  it  was  the  warden's  duty  to  support  him 
in  the  vestry  the  senior  warden's  will  should,  at  least  on  mat- 
ters financial,  be  supreme.  There  is  much  to  be  said  for  such 
a  theory. 

Now  my  aim  had  ever  been  to  make  St.  George's  increasingly 
democratic.  Mr.  Morgan  had  pledged  himself  to  aid  me  and 
stand  back  of  me  in  this.  He  had  never  forgotten  his  pledge  to 
me,  that  memorable  first  night  in  his  study,  when  he  looked  me 
in  the  face  and  said:  "Done!"  and  he  had  never  shirked  that 
promise.  But  when,  in  the  pursuance  of  this  policy,  I  began 
steadily  to  attempt  an  alteration  in  the  make-up  of  my  vestry, 
he  balked. 

Legislation  lately  passed  at  Albany  permitted  certain  very 
needful  elasticities  in  the  organization  of  vestries  in  the  Prot- 
estant Episcopal  Church  in  the  state.  I  wished  to  take  ad- 
vantage of  this  to  increase  my  vestry,  at  this  time  consisting 
of  the  usual  eight  vestrymen  and  two  wardens.  Of  these 
vestrymen  I  have  spoken  again  and  again.  They  were  an  un- 
usually capable  body  of  men,  but  efficient  and  loyal  as  they  had 
proved  themselves,  they  in  my  opinion  but  very  partially  rep- 
resented St.  George's  extraordinarily  heterogeneous  congrega- 
tion. In  my  weekly  talks  after  breakfast  with  Mr.  Morgan,  I 
had  many  times  brought  up  this  subject,  but  in  vain  I  tried 
to  get  a  response  from  him.  He  had  nothing  to  say,  and  that 
meant,  I  knew  well,  that  he  remained  quite  unmoved  by  my 
arguments. 

This  being  the  situation,  I  made  up  my  mind  to  wait  a 
while.  I  had  never  found  it  necessary,  since  1884,  to  bring  up 
in  the  vestry  a  matter  in  which  my  warden  and  I  were  opposed. 
I  always  strove  to  settle  such  divergency  of  views  "out  of  school." 
In  1884,  when  I  insisted  on  putting  the  choir  into  surplices,  he 
almost  had  a  panic,  and  for  a  time  opposed  the  move  fiercely. 


28o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Since  then  we  had  been  a  unit  at  all  vestry  meetings,  and  in- 
deed, I  usually  got  him  to  propose  at  vestry  meetings  such 
measures  as  I  desired  carried. 

However,  it  was  not  so  to  be  in  this  matter.  The  vestry 
met  at  8 :  30  p.  m.  in  the  Corporation  room  in  the  Parish  House. 
There,  one  night,  I  had  the  surprise  and  the  fight  of  my  life.  I 
had  no  hint  of  what  was  coming  when,  ordinary  business  being 
over,  Mr.  Morgan  rose  and  said:  "I  have  a  motion  to  make, 
Mr.  Chairman,  and  I  think  that  the  vestry  will  agree  with  me 
it  had  better  be  passed  without  debate."  He  then  read  his 
motion.  It  was  that  the  vestry  be  reduced  from  eight  mem- 
bers and  two  wardens  to  six  members  and  two  wardens.  Hav- 
ing read  it,  he  said:  "I  think  the  vestry  will  agree  with  me  that 
when  I  get  a  seconder  it  had  better  be  passed  without  debate." 

I  was  fairly  stunned.  I  am  not,  I  have  never  been,  quick 
to  act  on  the  occasion,  but  I  saw  that  as  chairman  I  must 
dominate  the  situation  instantly,  or  I  was  undone  and  my 
vestry  divided.  I  said:  "Mr.  Morgan,  before  I  ask  for  a 
seconder  to  your  motion,  I  must  say  that  I  think  on  a  mat- 
ter so  important  as  the  alteration  of  this  vestry,  you  surely 
should  have  said  something  to  me  of  this  radical  policy  you 
propose  before  you  advanced  it  here.  Since  I  stood  in 
your  study  that  night  when  you  called  me  to  the  church,  I 
think  you  will  bear  witness  that  I  have  never  advocated  any 
important  matter  in  this,  our  church's  counsel,  without  first 
discussing  it  with  you.  Here  now  you  spring  this  revolutionary 
proposition  on  me,  and  on  the  vestry,  without  any  warning 
whatever;  and  you  ask  that  we  should  proceed  to  pass  it  with- 
out any  discussion.  This  I  cannot  agree  to,  and  I  must  ask 
you,  before  you  get  a  seconder,  to  explain  to  me  and  to  this 
vestry  your  reasons  for  proposing  so  important  a  change.  We 
have  done  good  work  together,  constituted  as  we  are.  If  a  small 
vestry  is  for  St.  George's  a  better  vestry,  there  must  be  reasons 
for  it.     What  are  your  reasons  ? " 

Very  unwillingly  Mr.  Morgan  got  on  his  feet.  What  he 
said  was  what  I  feared  he  was  going  to  say.  In  brief  outline, 
it  was  this:  "Rector,  we  are  all  more  than  satisfied  with  what 
you  have  accomplished.  You  have  done  your  part  well.  We 
are  glad  and  proud  to  have  aided  you.  But  this,  your  vestry, 
has  its  part  to  do.     Yours  is  a  spiritual  responsibility.     Your 


MY  SENIOR  WARDEN  281 

part  is  to  teach  the  Christian  religion,  and  all  that  implies,  to 
the  congregation.  The  vestry's  part  is  fiduciary.  Our  ob- 
ligations are  financial.  I  am  its  senior  warden  and  responsible 
officer.  I  am  ageing.  I  want  at  times  to  have  these  vestry 
meetings  held  in  my  study.  This  vestry  should  be  composed, 
in  my  judgment,  of  men  whom  I  can  invite  to  my  study,  and 
who  can  help  me  to  carry  the  heavy  financial  burden  of  the 
church.  Surely  all  will  agree  that  such  responsibilities  as  ours 
can  best  be  discharged  in  this  way  and  by  such  a  body  of  men. 
The  rector  wants  to  democratize  the  church,  and  we  agree 
with  him  and  will  help  him  as  far  as  we  can.  But  I  do  not  want 
the  vestry  democratized.  I  want  it  to  remain  a  body  of  gentle- 
men whom  I  can  ask  to  meet  me  in  my  study." 

The  issue  was  plain;  no  evading  it.  If  my  senior  warden 
was  to  have  his  way,  St.  George's  vestry  would  pass  under  his 
control.  It  would  not,  it  could  not  be,  in  any  true  sense, 
representative  of  the  congregation.  In  the  long  fight,  for  fight 
it  was,  which  began  shortly  after  nine  o'clock  and  did  not  end 
till  almost  midnight,  I  did  all  I  could  do,  all  that  love  for  my 
friend  and  love  for  my  people  prompted,  to  turn  him  from  his 
purpose,  but  I  failed  completely.  And  as  I  opposed  that 
purpose  unflinchingly,  his  anger  at  opposition  rose.  Seeing  I 
could  gain  nothing  there,  I  spoke  over  his  head  to  my  vestry: 
"Yes,  your  obligation  is  fiduciary,  as  my  warden  says,  but  I 
protest  with  all  my  soul  that  the  main  purpose  you  have 
been  elected  to  fill  is  not  fiduciary  but  spiritual.  A  few  years 
ago,  you  thought  I  would  never  stand  in  the  pulpit  and  preach 
to  you  again.  If  that  had  been  so,  on  whom  would  have  fallen 
responsibility  of  choosing  someone  to  teach  and  help  this  multi- 
tude of  young  people  that,  with  your  aid,  has  been  gathered 
here?  Is  there  one  of  you  to-night  who  will  say  that  any  ques- 
tion of  finance  can  be  as  important  as  that  duty?  To-night, 
for  the  first  time  since  I  have  been  your  rector,  I  find  myself 
in  opposition  to  my  senior  warden.  Mr.  Morgan  has  laid 
his  plan  for  what  this  vestry  should  be  before  you,  and  you 
must  vote  on  it.  Before  you  do  so,  I  will  as  frankly  tell  you 
mine.  I  do  not  want  a  smaller  vestry.  I  want  a  larger  one. 
For  here  in  our  parish  council,  I  want  men  who  are  actually 
representative  of  St.  George's  membership,  men  who  know 
what  that  great  body  wants  and  feels.     I  will  be  specific.    Our 


282  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Sunday  School  of  two  thousand  is  a  church  within  a  church. 
One  man  in  that  school  has  done  more  for  its  efficiency  than  any 
other.  For  many  years  he  has  been  practically  its  head.  He 
knows  the  hundred  and  sixty  men  and  women  who  form  a  band 
of  teachers  the  like  of  which,  I  make  bold  to  say,  cannot  be 
found  in  any  church  in  our  Communion  in  this  land.  He  has 
had  more  to  do  with  choosing  them  than  have  I  or  my  clergy. 
I  want  that  man  on  my  vestry,  and  I  want  him  because  one 
who  has  done  what  he  has  done,  and  knows  what  he  knows, 
should  have  a  voice  in  deciding  the  policy  of  a  church  into  which 
he  has  helped,  more  than  any  one  other  man,  to  bring  over 
fifteen  hundred  new  young  members  in  ten  years.  But  others, 
too,  I  want  in  this  vestry,  who  would  represent  fittingly  the 
very  great  number  of  wage  earners  that  are  now  regular  members 
of  St.  George's.  These  should  be  represented  by  one  of  their 
own  number  and  class." 

I  could  feel  that,  as  I  pleaded  with  all  my  soul  for  a  demo- 
cratic and  more  representative  vestry,  I  had  the  support,  as  yet 
unspoken,  of  a  majority  of  those  present;  but  I  wanted  to  win  a 
verdict  if  possible  without  a  division.  I  would  have  done  al- 
most anything  to  save  my  warden  from  pushing  to  certain 
defeat  his  motion.  "Will  you  not  withdraw  your  motion?"  I 
said.  "Do  not  let  us  divide;  we  never  have  had  a  division  on 
any  serious  question  in  this  vestry  since  I  sat  at  your  head." 

Here  Seth  Low,  Mayor  of  New  York,  who  had  for  years 
been  the  teacher  of  the  senior  Men's  Bible  Class  in  our  Sun- 
day School,  appealed  to  Mr.  Morgan  in  a  moving  speech  to 
withdraw  his  motion.  Mr.  Morgan  remained  immovable. 
Then  a  dramatic  thing  happened.  A  member  of  the  vestry, 
one  of  his  oldest  friends,  one  to  whom  in  these  financially  trou- 
blesome times  through  which  we  were  then  passing  Mr.  Morgan 
had  been  of  immense  service  (I  did  not  know  this  till  later) 
slowly  rose.  He  was  white  to  the  lips,  and,  turning  to  Mr. 
Morgan,  he  said:  "Mr.  Morgan,  I  am  compelled  to  agree  with 
our  rector  fully  in  this  matter,  and  I  move  that  this  vestry  be 
increased  to  eleven."  Mr.  Low  seconded  the  motion  at  once. 
Mr.  Morgan  would  not  withdraw  but  could  get  no  seconder. 
So  I  put  the  second  motion,  which  was  carried.  The  vote 
stood  seven  to  one. 

For  a  moment  we  all  sat  in  intense  silence.     What  would 


MY  SENIOR  WARDEN  283 

this  man  whom  we  all  loved  and  honoured  do  ?  How  take  this 
cruel  rebuff,  so  unwillingly  given  him  ?  Not  one  in  that  vestry 
but  felt  he  had  been  honoured  in  sitting  in  it  with  him. 

He  rose  and,  speaking  slowly,  said:  "Rector,  I  will  never  sit 
in  this  vestry  again."  Then,  as  all  still  sat  in  silence,  he  walked 
out.  I  gave  the  blessing,  and  everyone  went  home.  It  had 
been  a  hard  night  for  the  vestry,  a  harder  one  for  me.  And 
hardest  of  all,  I  believe,  for  my  warden. 

Next  day  I  had  Mr.  Morgan's  written  resignation,  with  a 
request  to  submit  it  to  the  vestry  without  delay.  I  acknowl- 
edged his  letter,  and  nothing  more,  going  to  breakfast  next 
week  at  219  Madison  Avenue  as  usual.  As  I  expected,  he  was 
very  grumpy,  and  at  the  breakfast  table  conversation  was 
limited  to  the  weather.  Next  week  I  went  again  to  breakfast. 
He  had  nothing  to  say  to  me  at  the  table. 

As  I  asked  for  a  cigar,  in  his  study  afterward,  he  said,  "Have 
you  submitted  my  resignation?" 

"I  have  not,  and  I  will  not." 

"Why  not?" 

"  Because  I  will  not  now  or  ever  put  you  in  the  position  of 
going  back  on  your  pledge  to  the  rector  and  the  vestry  of  St. 
George's  Church." 

"What  do  you  mean?" 

"You  know  what  I  mean.  When  I  first  came  to  you  I  came 
because  you  gave  me  your  hand  and  your  promise  to  stand  by 
me  in  the  hard  work  that  lay  ahead.  I  told  you  I  was  a  radical. 
I  told  you  I  would  do  all  I  could  to  democratize  the  church.  I 
am  only  keeping  my  word.  I  certainly  shall  not  now,  nor  at 
any  time,  do  anything  to  help  you  break  yours." 

Dead  silence.     So  I  lit  my  cigar  and  walked  away. 

I  think  after  that  I  went  to  breakfast  three  times  before  Mr. 
Morgan  sailed  for  Europe.  He  never  made  another  allusion  to 
his  resignation,  nor  did  he  enter  into  any  private  conversation 
with  me.  The  day  he  sailed,  I  did  what  I  had  not  done  before, 
I  went  to  the  dock  to  bid  him  good-bye.  On  this  occasion,  in 
the  days  I  am  writing  of,  the  late  '90's,  a  rather  miscellaneous 
crowd  was  wont  to  gather  to  bid  him  good-bye.  It  had  become 
quite  a  function,  and  I  did  not  usually  care  to  take  part  in  it. 
As  I  went  up  the  gangplank,  I  saw  Mr.  Morgan  standing  at 
some  distance  surrounded  bv  his  friends.     At  the  same  instant 


284  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

he  saw  me,  and  coming  out  of  the  group,  signed  to  me  to  follow 
him.  He  made  for  his  cabin,  entered  quickly,  without  saying  a 
word,  and  shut  and  bolted  the  door  behind  us.  We  never  had 
another  falling  out. 

When  he  chose  to  exercise  it,  there  was  an  extraordinary 
and  winning  charm  about  J.  Pierpont  Morgan.  It  has  been 
my  fortunate  lot  to  meet  many  who  had  power  to  draw  to  them- 
selves the  affection  and  loyalty  of  their  fellows,  but  I  have 
never  known  a  man  who  could  make  people  love  him  for  his 
own  sake  more  than  could  he.  He  was  a  lavish  giver,  but  it 
was  not  for  his  gifts  that  he  was  loved,  and  he  was  loved  by  a 
very  great  many  people.  I  have  never  seen  any  eyes  quite 
like  his.  They  had  penetration  and  kindliness  combined  to  an 
extraordinary  degree.  When  he  said  a  thing,  and  looked  full 
at  you  as  he  said  it,  to  doubt  him  was  impossible.  That  first 
night  of  our  meeting,  I  thought  him  a  wonderful  man,  a  man 
quite  in  a  class  by  himself,  unlike  any  one  I  had  ever  seen;  and 
I  am  of  that  opinion  still. 

Mr.  Morgan  was  a  man  of  faith.  His  faith  was  threefold: 
Faith  in  himself  and  his  business  judgment  (when  I  first  knew 
him  I  should  say  that  outside  of  his  office,  where  he  was  king, 
he  was  singularly  self-distrustful  and  diffident.  This  diffidence 
passed  as  years  brought  him  power  and  flattery) ;  faith  in  the 
religion  of  Jesus,  as  formulated  by  the  Puritan  Calvinistic 
divines;  and  faith  in  the  stability  and  greatness  of  the  United 
States.     He  was  intensely  and  unselfishly  patriotic. 

In  religious  matters,  and  he  was  deeply  religious,  he  had  no 
vision  of  reforms,  and  generally  little  sympathy  with  reformers. 
On  the  religious  side  of  his  nature,  he  was  intensely  conserva- 
tive. His  beliefs  were  to  him  precious  heirlooms.  He  bowed 
before  them  as  the  Russian  bows  to  the  "ikon"  before  he 
salutes  the  master  of  the  house.  The  Evangelical  "Plan  of 
Salvation  "  was  to  him  what  the  Ark  of  the  Covenant  was  to  the 
ancient  Judaism.  Of  how  that  "plan"  grew,  what  other 
earlier  plans  were  merged  in  it,  he  knew  nothing.  So  Mr. 
Morgan  had  the  peace  and  power  of  religious  assurance,  while 
the  very  nature  of  his  assurance  precluded  in  him  the  possibility 
of  spiritual  development.  His  religion  was  a  talent  to  be 
wrapped  in  its  own  napkin  and  venerated  in  the  secret  place 
of  his  soul;  laid  aside  in  safe  disuse,  rather  than  passed  from 


MY  SENIOR  WARDEN  285 

man  to  man  in  life's  great  barter.  To  treat  religion  as  an  ikon 
is  so  much  more  natural  than  to  put  it  out  at  interest.  It  is 
commonly  done,  but  Jesus  said  it  was  a  mistake.  To  many- 
good  men,  their  religion  has  become  a  water-tight  compartment 
in  life's  ship,  separated  quite  from  the  miscellaneous  cargo 
which  it  carries.  Perhaps  it  may  keep  the  ship  from  sinking. 
If  so,  that  is  all  that  can  be  said  for  it. 

I  have  noticed  that  most  of  us,  perhaps  unconsciously,  are  in 
some  part  of  our  nature  resentful  of  change.  In  ordinary  mat- 
ters, wherein  we  are  constantly  in  touch  with  the  lives  of  others, 
we  must  change  or  we  suffer;  must  adapt  ourselves  or  fail  of 
gaining  what  we  strive  for.  But  religion  we  think  we  can  af- 
ford to  treat  as  an  individual  matter  only;  while  the  truth  is, 
it  is  above  all  other  interests  in  our  lives  the  one  part  of  our- 
selves that  so  treated  withers  in  disuse.  It  was  meant  to  be 
leaven,  not  a  gold  brick.  Its  very  nature  and  property  is  ex- 
pansion. This  divine  property  Mr.  Morgan  found  it  hard  to 
see.  His  mental  qualities  drew  him  strongly  to  the  ecclesias- 
tical side  of  the  Episcopal  Church's  life.  Its  very  archaic 
element,  its  atmosphere  of  withdrawal  from  common  everyday 
affairs  of  men,  answered  to  some  need  of  his  soul.  The  floor 
of  the  convention,  the  association  with  men  who  were,  by 
virtue  of  their  office,  guardians  and  exponents  of  a  religious 
tradition,  beautiful  and  venerable,  had  for  him  an  attraction 
stronger  than  any  other  gathering  afforded. 

He  would  cast  all  other  duties  aside  and  sit  for  hours,  atten- 
tively following  the  details  of  the  driest  of  debates,  on  subjects 
that  could  interest  only  an  ecclesiastic.  And  this  quality  in 
him  was  all  the  more  remarkable  since  he  had  never  read  general 
church  history.  On  the  history  of  the  American  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church,  however,  he  was  thoroughly  well  informed. 
And  its  successes  or  failures,  in  all  parts  of  the  United  States, 
he  watched  carefully  from  year  to  year. 

He  thoroughlydisliked  and  distrusted  ritualism  and  ritualists. 
Yet  even  here,  his  intense  respect  for  the  offices  and  ordinances 
of  his  church  was  ever  modifying  his  opinion. 

But  there  was  a  quality  in  Mr.  Morgan  that  tended  to  place 
him  among  those  who  stood  for  advance  and  reform  in  religious 
matters;  a  quality  that  balanced  the  hyper-conservatism  of 
his  religious  nature — his  constant  habit  of  trusting  men  who 


286  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

did  things.  He  was  always  looking  for  men  fit  to  lead.  He 
believed  more  in  men  than  in  measures.  Once  he  found  the 
man  he  was  looking  for,  or  thought  he  had  found  him,  he  gave 
that  man  large  freedom  of  action.  He  was  willing  to  trust  him 
far,  and  stood  ready  to  defend  him  bravely  and  long. 

Many  said  and  say  that  Pierpont  Morgan  was  a  great  judge 
of  men.  That  was  not  his  opinion  of  himself.  Once  he 
said  to  me:  "I  am  not  a  good  judge  of  men.  My  first  shot  is 
sometimes  right.  My  second  never  is."  Mr.  Morgan  ac- 
cepted and  was  completely  satisfied  with  the  extremest  evangel- 
ical doctrine  in  common  currency  when  he  was  a  boy.  Now 
from  the  very  first  I  made  it  plain  that,  though  I  had  been 
brought  up  in  such  beliefs,  they  were  mine  no  longer;  that  on 
all  ecclesiastical  matters  I  was  a  radical;  and  that  if  I  were 
elected  rector,  I  should  do  all  that  in  me  lay  to  make  St. 
George's  Church  stand  sociologically,  ecclesiastically,  and 
theologically  for  reform. 

At  the  bottom  of  his  heart,  he  could  not  have  liked  this. 
But  right  here  the  practical  and  always  dominant  side  of  the 
man  asserted  itself.  He  was  ever  in  support  of  any  one  who 
could  do  things  that  had  to  be  done.  He  loved  the  old  church. 
He  would  do  anything  to  save  it.  Its  salvation  was  quite 
beyond  anything  he  or  the  vestry  could  do.  So  much  he  knew, 
for  he  was  ever  quick  to  size  up  accurately  a  situation.  If 
another  man  saw,  or  thought  he  saw,  a  way  to  success,  that 
man  in  the  prosecution  of  his  endeavour  should  have  every  bit 
of  trust  and  support  that  he  could  give  him. 

Such  a  support  Pierpont  Morgan  ever  gave  me.  And  at 
times  it  was  cruelly  hard  for  him  to  give  it.  As  I  slowly  came 
to  know  him — for  he  was  a  hard  man  to  know — I  saw  that  what 
he  had  given  me  he  gave  to  others.  It  was  his  way.  Having 
once  made  up  his  mind  to  trust  any  one,  man,  woman,  or  child, 
he  trusted  largely,  trusted  till  they  failed  him,  and  sometimes 
after  they  had  failed  him.  He  seemed  sometimes  to  exact  a 
great  deal  from  those  he  thus  trusted.  But  the  truth  is  that  his 
unequalled  power  of  making  those  he  cared  to  attract  love  him 
often  made  hard  work  done  to  gain  his  approval  a  pleasant 
task. 

From  the  first,  I  formed  the  habit  of  going  to  him  and  telling 
him  my  plans.     I  tried  this  first  at  his  downtown  office,  but 


MY  SENIOR  WARDEN  287 

soon  found  that  would  not  do.  He  suggested  that  I  come  to 
breakfast  at  "219"  instead,  and  thus  a  habit  was  formed, 
which  I  kept  up  till  1905,  of  breakfasting  with  him  for  a  good 
part  of  the  year  once  a  week;  sometimes  even  oftener. 

I  soon  found  out  two  things:  First,  that  I  could  not  convince 
him  of  the  advisability  of  most  of  the  changes  I  was  bent  on 
making.  So  I  had  to  go  ahead  and  make  them  anyway.  And 
secondly,  that  even  when  he  particularly  disliked  them,  he 
liked  the  confidence  I  showed  in  him  by  telling  him  all  about 
them  beforehand.  For  all  the  throngs  of  friends  surrounding 
him,  for  all  the  love  and  fire  of  personal  devotion  to  himself 
which  he,  all  unwittingly  sometimes  it  seemed,  kindled  in  his 
very  nearest,  he  was  more  reserved  than  any  man  I  ever 
knew.  When  under  life's  stress  that  reserve  broke  down,  then 
the  profound  emotionalism  of  his  nature  had  its  way  with 
him.  The  great  deeps  were  broken  up,  and  he  called  aloud  for 
help. 

Three  times  in  thirty  years  all  shadow  of  reserve  between 
us  was  thus  swept  aside.  I  do  not  know  that  as  he  thus  clung 
to  me,  I  was  able  to  do  him  any  good,  but  at  least  I  told  him 
what  I  thought  was  the  truth;  and  if  love  and  longing  could 
help  a  man,  he  ought  to  have  had  some  succor  from  me. 

As  everyone  knows,  he  hated  writing  letters,  and  to  the 
newspapers  he  never  wrote.  But  I  find  one  long  letter  among 
my  papers,  put  aside  in  1891.  It  was  not  necessary  to  publish 
it.  The  criticism  it  aimed  to  answer  was  silly  and  shallow,  and 
died  of  itself.  Briefly  it  was  this:  I  had  asked  a  number  of 
clergymen  of  other  denominations  than  Episcopal  to  speak  in 
George's  Church  on  Friday  evenings  in  Lent.  There  arose 
talk  of  presenting  me  to  the  Bishop.  Mr.  Morgan  heartily 
disliked  my  plan  of  offering  St.  George's  pulpit  to  any  other 
than  Episcopal  clergy.  It  was  a  new  idea,  and  in  matters 
ecclesiastical  old  things  were  good  enough  for  him.  But  the 
rector  proposed  doing  it,  and  his  business  was  to  support  the 
rector.  Thus,  without  so  much  as  a  hint  from  me,  he  did  what 
all  who  knew  him  will  remember  he  never  did:  he  wrote  the  fol- 
lowing letter  to  the  New  York  daily  papers,  defending  my  ac- 
tion. 

The  letter  was  written  at  two  o'clock  at  night,  and  in  its 
wording  shows  evident  signs  of  weariness. 


288  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

1  A.  m.  Wednesday. 
Dear  Rector: — 

I  have  done  what  I  could.  Show  this  to  Bishop  Potter  and  use  it  as  you 
think  best. 

J.  P.  M. 

The  attacks  in  the  daily  press  upon  the  Rev.  Dr.  Rainsford  and  the  work 
in  which  he  is  engaged  are  most  unwarranted,  and  certainly  are  based  upon  a 
misunderstanding  of  the  facts,  and  are  calculated  to  do  injury  to  the  great 
work  of  St.  George's  Church,  which,  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say,  has  no 
parallel  in  the  United  States. 

Let  those  who  would  be  hypercritical  visit  St.  George's  Church,  and 
witness  the  services  held  there.  The  thronged  Church  at  the  regular  ser- 
vices. Let  them  see  the  Confirmation  of  over  two  hundred,  who  were  last 
Sunday  presented  to  the  Bishop  for  that  rite,  and  then  say  whether  there  are 
any  signs  of  want  of  loyalty  to  the  Episcopal  Church,  or  any  evidence  of 
disregard  of  the  laws  of  ritual  or  worship. 

I  state  without  fear  of  contradiction,  that  there  is  no  church  in  our  com- 
munion where  greater  care  is  exercised  by  the  Rector,  Warden,  and 
Vestrymen  to  avoid  anything  which  might  be  open  to  criticism  in  the  ser- 
vices than  in  St.  George's,  for,  independent  of  their  loyalty  to  the  Church, 
they  recognize  the  fact  that  any  other  course  would  jeopardize  the  greatest 
success  and  sympathy  with  their  work. 

As  regards  the  particular  services  to  which  exception  is  taken,  they  are 
nothing  new.  Several  years  ago,  Dr.  Rainsford  instituted  a  course  of  lec- 
tures on  Friday  evening  in  the  Church,  upon  subjects  which  are  engrossing 
the  thought  of  the  Christian  world. 

Dr.  Rainsford  called  to  his  aid  the  best  writers  and  thinkers  he  could 
secure,  both  clerical  and  lay.  The  lectures  were,  and  now  are,  delivered  at 
no  regular  service,  but  at  one  arranged  for  this  special  purpose;  they  are 
largely  attended,  and  have  doubtless  been  of  great  benefit  to  many. 

I  do  not  think  any  one  inclined  to  be  just  could  for  one  moment  think  that 
there  was  any  want  of  loyalty  to  the  Church  or  its  Ministry  on  the  part  of 
Dr.  Rainsford  or  his  Vestry,  and  under  these  circumstances,  and  upon  this 
statement  of  facts,  I  feel  I  can  consistently  ask  fair  treatment  at  the  hands 
of  those  inclined  to  question  what  has  been  done. 

Signed, 
J.  P.  Morgan. 

Never  once  in  all  my  twenty-four  years  of  rectorship  did 
he  criticize  any  single  statement  I  made  from  the  pulpit;  he 
always  gave  me  that  practical  evidence  of  his  belief  in  the 
liberty  of  the  pulpit.  That  he  did  disagree  with  many  of  them 
strongly  any  one  could  see.  At  times  I  noticed  he  even  had 
recourse  to  his  hymn-book  while  I  preached.  But  I  came  to 
judge  pretty  accurately  the  seriousness   of  the   disagreement 


MY  SENIOR  WARDEN  289 

between  us  by  the  hour  of  his  appearance  at  the  church  door 
the  following  Sunday.  If  he  liked  the  sermon,  he  was  sure  to 
be  on  time.  When  he  was  late,  I  made  a  point  of  being  early 
at  his  breakfast  table  on  Monday. 

Many  love  to  bow  themselves  before  the  strong.  And  so 
an  environment  of  almost  universal  flattery  and  adulation, 
sometimes  gross  and  fawning,  sometimes  charming  and  refined, 
moved  with  him  wherever  he  went.  Most  men  would  have 
been  debased  by  it.  It  hurt  him,  of  course,  for  he  was  human. 
But  how  great  a  man,  how  true  a  friend  he  remained,  in  spite 
of  it  all,  some  who  have  loved  and  watched  him  for  many  years, 
loved  him  for  his  great  selfhood  alone,  know  well. 

Pierpont  Morgan's  was  too  emotional  a  nature  to  escape 
depression.  At  times  he  deeply  doubted  himself.  He  had 
hours,  and  more  than  once  they  were  prolonged,  of  despairing 
despondency.  But  such  experiences  were  the  result  of  over- 
strain and  nervous  collapse,  not  of  intellectual  conviction. 
Intellectually  he  was  an  optimist.  As  he  aged,  he  suffered  from 
those  tragically  mistaken,  self-chosen  falsities  of  environment 
that  many  of  the  most  brilliant  men  of  his  time  were  limited  by. 
He  was  no  scholar,  no  reader,  and  he  had  not  learned  to  care  for 
nature,  or  find  any  rest  or  companionship  in  her  high  company. 
So  unrest  and  ennui  were  sometimes  his.  Loyalest  of  friends, 
he  was  intemperate  and  sometimes  unjust  in  his  oppositions.  Of 
President  Roosevelt  he  would  hear  nothing  good.  Yet  the  two 
men  were  made  for  a  fine  cooperation. 

I  came  to  understand  how  it  was  that  my  warden  was,  in 
some  of  his  antipathies,  so  unreasonable.  His  own  aims  were 
absolutely  honest  and  patriotic.  He  knew,  when  he  was  trying 
for  some  big  thing,  that  it  was  not  primarily  in  order  to  gain 
fortune  for  himself  out  of  it,  but  chiefly  to  advance  thereby  the 
public  good.  I  do  not  flatter  him  in  this.  /  state  what  I  be- 
lieve to  be  but  the  truth  when  I  say  that,  in  his  determination  to 
fulfill  what  he  believed  to  be  his  obligations  to  those  who 
trusted  him,  and  to  the  land  he  loved,  there  did  not,  in  all 
New  York's  multitude,  live  a  man  more  single-eyed  than  Pier- 
pont Morgan.  No  venom  of  attack,  no  malicious  slander 
poured  on  the  man,  made  him  deviate  by  one  hair's  breadth 
from  this  his  life  purpose. 

Then  he  had  full  occasion  to  gauge  the  moral  rottenness 


290 


THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 


of  much  of  the  political  life  of  the  time.  He  saw  men  he  knew 
who,  by  alliance  with  Tammany  in  New  York,  or  by  purchased 
legislation  at  Albany  or  at  Washington,  were  doing  things  he 
would  rather  die  than  do.  Yet  these  men  had  no  United 
States  Government  against  them,  and  he  did.  He  came  to  think 
that  the  immediate  future  of  the  country  was  safer  in  the  hands  of 
business  men  like  himself  than  in  those  of  its  politicians  or  chosen 
representatives.  Remember,  he  was  not  alone  at  that  time 
in  so  thinking.  Many  thought  with  him  that,  for  the  country's 
good,  it  were  well  to  have  business  methods  master  political. 
That  such  a  programme  was  mistaken  is  clear  enough  now, 
but  it  took  a  leader  as  fearless  of  personal  consequences  as 
Theodore  Roosevelt  to  make  the  country  see  it  thirty  years  ago. 

Mr.  Morgan  had  been  reared  in  New  England,  and  like 
others  prominent  in  business  a  generation  ago,  suffered  a  heavy 
handicap  in  consequence.  Those  were  days  of  sectionalism. 
(Read  the  two  autobiographies  of  Charles  Francis  and  Henry 
Adams.)  Boys  went  to  school  in  the  East,  and  if  they  went  to 
college,  went  to  an  Eastern  college.1 

The  same  mistake  is  still  usually  made.  An  Eastern  school- 
boy needs  a  Western  college  life.  In  college  life,  something 
more  important  than  building  up  school  friendships  should 
be  aimed  at.  There  was  little  in  the  boys'  lives,  during  these 
formative  years,  which  fitted  them  to  understand  any  social 
class  but  their  own,  and  still  worse,  their  own,  as  it  was  illus- 
trated to  them  by  Eastern  men  only.  What  did  they  know 
of  the  mighty  people  across  the  Mississippi  ? 

Mr.  Morgan  and  his  business  associates  were  dependent  for 
their  knowledge  of  the  West  on  occasional  junketing  expeditions, 
hurriedly  taken,  in  well-found  Pullman  cars,  over  thousands 
of  miles  of  railroads  that  they  controlled.  Such  expeditions 
were  scarcely, an  adequate  introduction  to  the  millions  whose 
well-being  depended  largely  on  those  roads.  Those  magnates, 
when  they  left  New  York  or  Chicago,  were,  though  they  knew 
it  not,  like  the  water  beetle  you  can  see  in  summer  time  in  a 
brook.  It  is  a  little,  perambulating  diving  bell.  Wherever  it 
goes,  it  carries  its  own  atmosphere  with  it  in  a  silvery  bubble. 

But  I  must  not  ramble  further.     To  sum  up,  Mr.  Morgan 

1  Mr.  Morgan  studied  for  two  years  at  the  University  of  Gottingen,  Germany,  where  he  gave 
evidence  of  unusual  proficiency  in  Mathematics. 


MY  SENIOR  WARDEN  291 

was  ever  a  builder,  not  a  wrecker.  But  he  was  handicapped  by 
a  lack  of  knowledge  of  the  country  he  lived  to  serve.  He  did 
not  know  the  man  in  the  street,  the  man  on  the  farm,  or  in  the 
mine  or  factory.  How  should  he?  He  never  read  himself  into 
their  lives,  and  he  never  met  them. 

To  bring  my  warden  to  a  better  understanding  of  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  the  man,  and  his  policies,  I  did  my  poor  little  best. 
I  quite  failed.  The  President  wanted  to  get  on  with  Mr. 
Morgan.     The  misunderstanding  was  all  on  the  latter's  side. 

The  last  time  I  saw  my  friend  was  in  191 1.  We  had,  as 
was  common,  a  sharp  difference  about  President  Roosevelt.  I 
lost  patience  and  said:  "If  you  live  long  enough,  you  will  fall 
on  your  knees  and  pray  Almighty  God  to  give  you  him  again 
as  President  of  the  United  States." 

By  the  great  silence  they  are  set  apart, 
From  all  the  restless  longing  of  the  heart 
That  beats  in  us  so  passionate  and  strong; 
Are  passed  beyond  the  evening  Angelus, 
And  Memnon's  morning  song. 

I  wonder  if  they  have  met ! 

As  I  bring  to  an  end  this  poor  tribute  to  a  great  man  and  a 
great  friend,  I  want  to  repeat  what  I  have  said:  that  no  political 
measure  proposed  by  any  party,  however  disastrous  it  might 
prove  to  his  own  plans,  shook  for  one  moment  his  faith  in  the 
future,  the  great  and  honourable  future,  of  these  United  States. 
He  really  had  a  profound  belief  in  the  wisdom,  goodness,  final 
common  sense,  and  fair-mindedness  of  the  ordinary  citizen 
of  the  country;  and  he  was  willing  to  trust  his  reputation  and 
his  fortune  to  their  keeping. 

One  morning,  in  his  study,  he  spoke  to  me  about  the  need  of 
more  publicity  in  the  conduct  of  business.  There  had  been 
some  financial  flurries  in  the  West,  and  I  asked  why  it  should 
be,  since  business  seemed  good. 

J.  P.  M.     "The  fools  won't  show  each  other  their  books." 

W.  S.  R.     "But  you  would  not  show  your  books  to  any  one." 

J.  P.  M.  "Well,  Rector,  the  time  is  coming  when  all  busi- 
ness will  have  to  be  done  with  glass  pockets." 

His  nature  was  conservative.  He  was  inclined  to  resent 
change  of  any  sort  unless  he  inaugurated  it.     But  there  came 


292  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

to  Pierpont  Morgan  now  and  again  those  flashes  of  insight — 
long  ago  they  called  it  prophecy — a  rare  quality  in  our  nature, 
which,  however  it  expresses  itself,  moves  profoundly  the  souls  of 
men.  He  combined,  in  religious  matters,  a  stubborn  con- 
servatism with  a  wide  and  deep  tolerance.1  He  held  stoutly 
by  his  favourite  dogmas,  finally  stating  them  in  his  will.  And 
yet,  strangely  enough,  he  was  too  keen  sighted  to  think  that 
of  them  could  be  builded  a  platform  on  which  all  Christians 
could  stand  and  work  together.  In  later  years,  the  necessity  of 
uniting  all  Christian  churches  in  common  effort  was  very 
present  to  his  mind.  In  one  department  of  the  industrial  life 
of  the  time  he  had  been  the  foremost  exponent  of  the  need  of 
association.  The  need  of  like  action  in  religious  affairs  he 
clearly  saw. 

Pierpont  Morgan  gave  a  whole-hearted  allegiance  to  the 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church.  He  supported  it  for  he  loved  it. 
But  he  had  also  a  vision  of  a  Catholic  Church,  embracing  all 
faithful  men,  and  of  a  Holy  Communion  no  less  wide  than  the 
Communion  of  Humanity. 

Year  by  year,  till  Mr.  Morgan  died,  wherever  I  was,  there 
came  to  me  this  New  Year  greeting — 

"Dear  love  and  best  wishes  for  New  Year. 

"Commodore." 


JI  do  not  believe  that  any  or  all  of  my  teachings  or  preachings,  in  the  pulpit  or  out  of  it,  moved 
him  by  so  much  as  one  inch  from  the  "  plan  of  Salvation,"  the  tradition  of  his  youth,  which  he 
held  with  vise-like  tenacity.  Of  every  radical  proposition  I  advanced — ecclesiastical,  social,  re- 
ligious— he  disapproved;  yet  back  of  me,  ever  and  always,  was  his  firm  loyalty.  Without  it 
I  couldn't  have  accomplished  what  I  did. 


CHAPTER  XX 

Our  Parish  House 

In  all  time  of  our  Wealth,  Good  Lord  deliver  us. 

— The  Litany. 

The  new  St.  George's  was  a  success.  We  had  done  what  few 
believed  could  be  done.  A  free  church  stood,  prosperously 
paying  its  way,  where  a  pew  church  (though  one  of  the  most 
forceful  men  in  the  community  occupied  its  pulpit)  had  lost 
ground  gradually  and  finally  failed  altogether. 

We  had  won  first  the  attention  and  then  the  respect  of  the 
neighbourhood  and  of  the  city.  We  had  paid  our  debts  and 
laid  a  foundation  for  an  endowment.  In  free-will  offerings  on 
Sundays  we  were  receiving  three  times  as  much  as  the  pew 
rents  of  the  church  had  ever  yielded  in  its  palmiest  days.  St. 
George's  membership  was  learning  to  give  as  a  privilege,  as  an 
act  of  worship. 

Illustrating  this :  I  had  a  request  sent  me  by  a  number  of  my 
East  Side  poor.  They  wanted  to  know  if  they  could  have  five- 
or  ten-cent  Sunday  envelopes.  Twenty-five  cents  had  been 
our  lowest  figure  till  then  for  weekly  gifts.  The  times  were 
cruelly  hard,  and  twenty-five  cents  a  week  they  could  not  prom- 
ise. John  Reichert  and  his  helpers  went  round  and  we  added 
$1,000  a  year  to  the  church  offerings,  and  what  was  better, 
helped  those  people,  as  they  joined  in  the  common  worship, 
to  feel  as  they  had  not  done  before  that  they  were  part  and  par- 
cel of  it,  that  they  supported  it.1 

Wages  were  low  and  work  scarce.  We  made  no  special  ap- 
peals to  our  East  Side  friends,  yet  the  steady  stream  of  their 


HDne  hundred  and  ninety-five  new  envelopes  were  taken  by  people  living  on  First  Avenue 
and  east  of  it,  a  very  poor  district.  My  letter  was  put  into  German  by  John  Reichert,  with  the 
result  that  they  thought  the  rector  could  speak  German  as  well  as  English.  And  nothing 
would  do  for  them  but  that  I  must  preach  to  them  in  their  own  loved  tongue. 

293 


294  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

giving  never  dried  up.  Mr.  Morgan  had  undertaken  for  three 
years  to  double  any  gifts  made  for  the  endowment  fund  of  St. 
George's.  One  Monday  night  a  poor  woman  came  to  me  at 
the  Parish  House.  I  did  not  know  her;  her  name  was  not  on 
our  books.  "I  am  a  lonely  woman,"  she  said.  "St.  George's 
has  been  a  great  help  to  me.  I  have  saved  fifty  dollars.  I 
know  how  important  it  is  to  keep  the  church  here  where  it  is. 
Take  it  for  the  endowment." 

The  Girls'  Friendly  Society  was  composed  exclusively  of 
working  girls,  and  remember,  twenty-five  years  ago  the  condi- 
tions most  of  those  girls  worked  under  were  bad,  and  in  some 
cases  were  intolerably  bad,  and  their  wages  low.  St.  George's 
branch  of  the  Girls'  Friendly  Society  raised  among  themselves 
alone  and  sent  to  me  on  Christmas  Eve  $1,042.15;  the  product 
of  three  years'  saving.  That,  with  Mr.  Morgan's  gift,  added 
$2,084.30  to  the  endowment.  Think  what  that  money  cost 
those  girls! 

What  the  Girls'  Friendly  Society  did  every  organization 
housed  in  the  building  did  also.  One  and  all  turned  in  and  did 
their  share.  They  gave  $7,500  a  year  to  the  support  of  our 
work,  and  this  money,  much  the  greater  part  of  it,  came  from 
young  people  between  fourteen  and  twenty-five  years  old.  It 
was  money  that  was  saved  at  cost  to  themselves.  It  stood  for 
actual  self-denial. 

When  I  planned  the  Parish  House,  I  could  find  no  precedent 
to  follow.  I  had  in  my  own  mind  to  build  a  nest  for  the  thing 
I  was  trying  to  hatch  out  and  rear.  I  knew  there  must  be 
many  mistakes,  many  things  left  out. 

When  I  had  been  suddenly  ordered  to  leave  my  work,  the 
building  had  risen.  When  I  returned,  it  had  filled  up.  I  had 
great  expectations  of  what  it  would  enable  us  to  do.  I  came 
back  to  find  every  corner  of  it  crammed  with  young  people. 
The  need  of  the  thing  was  even  greater  than  I  knew. 

Some  who  read  my  book  will  remember  our  parish  building 
on  East  16th  Street.  Others  may  have  no  such  memories, 
and  if  they  are  interested  in  sociological  Christianity,  must 
know  many  buildings  far  larger,  far  superior  in  every  way,  to 
this  venture  we  made  so  long  ago.  But  surely  what  we  aimed 
to  do  was  needed,  and  if  we  had  had  little  experience,  we  were 
going  the  right  way  to  get  it. 


OUR  PARISH  HOUSE  295 

The  Parish  House  was  my  own  hobby,  and  I  will  try  not  to 
ride  it  too  far  in  my  book,  but  as  I  turn  to  my  notes  of  long  ago, 
I  find  some  things  I  cannot  leave  out. 

It  was  evident  to  me  that  "mission  work,"  as  it  was  then,  and 
indeed  as  it  is  now,  carried  on  by  the  Protestant  churches  of 
all  denominations,  does  not  reach  the  best  class  of  our  working 
people:  the  self-respecting  class,  the  class  most  important  to 
reach,  for  it  is  sure  to  dominate  the  labour  movements  of  the 
future. 

That  class  was  largely  lost  to  the  church.  But  here  I  would 
say  that  in  our  Parish  House  I  began  to  see  signs  of  the  presence 
of  a  section  of  our  East  Side  folk,  just  the  people  I  wanted  to 
know.  Ordinarily  mission  work  not  only  does  not  reach  these, 
it  sometimes  puts  another  barrier  in  the  path  of  their  approach 
to  the  church. 

The  reason  of  this  is  plain,  though  it  escapes  the  observation 
of  the  churches.  The  mission  appeal  is  to  the  least  deserving, 
the  least  independent — to  those  who  will  come  partly  "to  get." 
You  cannot  merge  the  women  and  children  of  such  households 
with  the  women  and  children  of  labour  union  workers,  any 
more  than  you  can  socially  join  together  the  labour  union  man 
and  the  "scab."  Many  good  Christians  deplore  this  fact,  but 
it  is  not  a  thing  to  be  deplored  at  all.  The  lower  you  go  in 
the  financial  scale  of  living,  the  more  important  is  the  obser- 
vation, yes,  the  rigid  observation,  of  the  laws  of  class.  They 
are  costly  and  persistent  things,  these  laws;  we  break  them  at 
our  peril. 

The  Parish  House  was  open  on  Monday  nights  to  everyone, 
and  meet  there  we  did,  from  Pierpont  Morgan  to  the  last 
adopted  Armenian  refugee.  The  big  reception  room  upstairs, 
off  which  were  my  assistant  clergy  rooms,  was  the  place  where 
strangers  were  welcomed,  and  from  which  they  were  conducted, 
if  they  so  desired,  round  the  many  classrooms.  If  the  old 
Avenue  A  folks  of  the  early  1880's  seldom  put  in  an  appearance 
here,  their  children  did  in  throngs,  and  as  they  did  so,  insensi- 
bly they  changed  class;  for  here  all  were  in  their  own  house, 
for  all  did  something  to  support  it. 

One  Monday  night,  to  my  intense  surprise  and  delight,  who 
should  turn  up  but  Phillips  Brooks.  I  took  him  all  round. 
The  place  was  buzzing  with  young  spring  life  from  basement 


296  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

to  attic.  The  youngsters  gazed  with  awe  at  the  immense  man, 
the  boys  in  the  Gym  doing  their  best  stunts  for  his  benefit. 
As  it  grew  late  he  came  back  with  me  to  the  rectory.  Phillips 
Brooks  seemed  to  me  to  show  signs  of  failing  even  then.  After 
a  while  he  said,  "I  must  have  a  parish  house  alongside  Trinity 
Church.  It  would  be  a  splendid  thing.  I  can  get  the  thing 
done";  and  the  dear  Great  Man  grew  quite  enthusiastic. 

Said  I:  "But  whom  are  you  going  to  get  to  create  the  organi- 
zation and  then  run  it  for  you?" 

"Why,  Rainsford,  you  could  do  that  for  me;  you  could  find 
me  a  man." 

"But  such  men  are  not  easy  to  find.  What  sort  of  a  man  do 
you  want  me  to  look  for?" 

"Why,  a  likely  deacon." 

"Ah,"  said  I,  "I  wish  we  could  find  likely  deacons  or  likely 
priests,  either,  who  could  do  what  you  long  to  see  done,  dear 
Doctor  Brooks.  Don't  put  up  a  parish  house  near  Trinity 
just  yet;  go  on  preaching." 

Phillips  Brooks  was  quiet  for  a  little  time,  and  then  said 
simply,  "I  think  you  are  right." 

On  the  first  Sunday  morning  in  the  month  we  had  a  little  dy&xri1 
of  our  own.  Then  the  young  communicants  of  the  church  came 
together;  all  the  class  leaders  and  Sunday-school  teachers  met 
their  scholars  at  the  Holy  Table,  and  the  old  church  was  some- 
times filled  to  the  last  seat  in  the  gallery.  I  always  preached  to 
them  for  a  few  minutes,  and  I  believe  that  those  morning  hours 
of  worship  many  of  us  will  remember  as  long  as  we  live. 

Sunday  School  followed  soon  after  this  service,  but  as  many 
came  from  a  great  distance,  and  the  number  of  these  increased 
year  by  year,  they  had  to  go  without  breakfast  or  bring  sand- 
wiches with  them. 

We  do  not  know  the  exact  usage  of  the  Church  of  the  First 
Century,  nor  how  the  large  number  who  must  have  sometimes 
partaken  received  the  bread  and  wine.  But  we  may  be  very 
sure  the  custom  of  the  time  differed  widely  from  the  stupid, 
wearisome  one  which  the  growth  of  a  sacerdotal  concept  of  the 
Eucharist  has  forced  on  Episcopalians  to-day,  making  some- 

1Aydirr)  was  the  meal  taken  with  or  after  Communion  in  the  first  century  of  the  Christian 
Church.  See  I  Cor.,  xi,  21.  The  custom  died  out.  St.  Paul  here  says  it  was  leading  in 
Corinth  to  disorder. 


OUR  PARISH  HOUSE  297 

times  what  should  be  our  most  beautiful  service  a  weariness  to 
the  flesh.  To  communicate  fifteen  hundred  or  more  people, 
as  was  common  at  St.  George's,  was  a  slow  matter;  but  since 
ours  was  the  Greek  fashion,  and  our  rail  was  semi-circular,  we 
were  better  able  to  deal  with  a  large  number  than  if  our  Holy 
Table  had  had  but  one  narrow  front. 

Even  with  the  advantage  of  the  semi-circular  rail,  when  fifteen 
hundred  persons  communicated,  my  people  stood  ranged  be- 
fore me,  row  on  row,  for  over  an  hour,  waiting  their  turn  to 
kneel.  This  long  wait  gave  me  a  good  opportunity  to  study 
their  faces.  One  spring  Sunday  morning  I  saw  a  tall  over- 
grown boy  of  eighteen  who  had  been  in  my  confirmation  class. 
He  was  leaning  against  the  chancel  wall,  and  his  face  looked 
white  and  drawn.  I  watched  for  him  after  the  service,  got  him 
into  the  Parish  House,  and  drew  the  truth  out  of  the  lad. 

The  times  were  very  hard.  His  father  was  out  of  work.  He 
was  earning  $3.50  a  week,  and  this  money  he  brought  to  his 
mother,  who  each  day  gave  him  ten  cents  for  his  luncheon.  His 
mother  was  suffering  from  some  internal  trouble,  and  longed 
for  the  advice  of  a  doctor  known  to  her  years  before,  when  she 
lived  in  another  part  of  the  town.  To  have  him  visit  her  would 
cost  three  dollars,  and  under  the  present  circumstances,  this  was 
an  expense  out  of  the  question.  Yet  he  wanted  his  mother  to 
have  that  doctor,  and  how  much  he  wanted,  the  white  face  of 
that  thin  eighteen-year-old,  half-fed  boy  told.  He  had  taken 
each  day  that  ten  cents  luncheon  money  from  his  mother  for 
five  weeks,  and  saved  it,  going  without  his  luncheon.  Then  he 
had  himself  fetched  that  doctor  to  his  mother's  side. 

Pretty  fine,  I  call  that !  That  boy  gave  me  the  idea  of  our 
Sunday  morning  agapae,  the  first  Sunday  in  the  month.  The 
deaconesses  got  the  coffee  ready  in  one  of  the  lower  rooms  of  the 
building,  and  all  who  lived  at  a  distance  and  had  work  to  do  in 
the  schools  before  the  eleven  o'clock  service  met  there  for  a 
simple  breakfast. 

We  do  not  make  enough  of  the  beautiful  things  we  find  in 
each  other.  We  permit  them  to  be  hidden  under  the  drab  sur- 
face of  daily  life.  We  treasure  the  writings  of  any  one  who  can 
make  us  see  something  of  that  light  "that  never  was  on  land  or 
sea."  But  what  beautiful  thing  is  as  lovely  or  as  lasting  as  the 
vision  of  the  great  intention  of  God,  visible  in  some  obscure 


a98  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

child  of  His  ?    When  we  see  such  a  thing  we  catch  the  meaning 
of  Emerson's  greeting  to  his  friend, 

All  things  through  thee  take  nobler  form 
And  look  beyond  the  Earth. 

I  have  nothing  to  leave  behind  me,  to  the  people  I  worked 
for  and  worked  with,  more  worthy  of  remembrance  than  such 
stories  as  these.  I  wrote  them  down  at  the  time,  and  as  I  go 
over  my  records  of  long  ago,  they  come  back  to  me  with  fresh 
beauty  and  power.     Here  is  another  worth  remembering: 

Every  organization  that  had  headquarters  in  the  Parish 
House  had  a  system  of  visitation.  Those  who  dropped  out 
were  visited.  I  cannot  over-emphasize  the  value  of  this 
work.  The  two  men  who,  more  than  any  others,  made  this 
department  a  success,  were  W.  H.  SchiefFelin  and  William 
Foulke,  both  members  of  the  vestry.  They  were  among  the 
very  first  who  came  to  my  side  when  I  stood  alone  in  the  empty 
old  church;  they  always  understood  and  they  never  failed 
me.  Both  have  gone  to  their  rest,  but  the  brotherly  spirit,  the 
outstretched  hand  and  welcoming  smile,  the  kindly,  unflagging 
patience  and  Christian  tact  of  these  two  faithful  servants  of 
their  fellow-men,  scores  of  the  poorer  members  of  St.  George's 
will  never  forget. 

This  is  Mr.  Schieffelin's  story.  A  young  mechanic,  holding 
a  well-paid  job,  was  missed  from  the  men's  club,  missed  from 
his  tenement  house,  missed  from  his  workshop.  He  was 
found  at  last  living  in  a  single  room  with  his  mother.  The  man 
was  under  thirty,  the  mother  quite  old,  smitten  with  a  sudden 
mental  decline,  passing  rapidly  into  complete  imbecility.  She 
was  helpless;  could  not  without  assistance  do  for  herself  the 
common  offices  of  life.  I  asked  him  why  he  did  not  get  a  nurse. 
Without  the  least  bit  of  pretentious  self-consciousness  he  made 
me  see  that  since  all  he  was  he  owed  to  his  mother,  he  was  quite 
unwilling  to  trust  her,  in  her  utter  helplessness,  to  any  hired 
stranger. 

"But,"  said  I,  "in  her  case  she  needs  care  hourly,  day  and 
night." 

"I  will  give  her  care  day  and  night." 

"What  about  your  work?  You  were  earning  high  wages,  I 
hear." 


OUR  PARISH  HOUSE  299 

"I  gave  up  my  work." 

"What  are  you  doing  now?" 

"Basket  work." 

"And  you  have  given  up  your  trade?" 

"Yes;  I  must  watch  over  my  mother,  and  I  can  work  at  bas- 
kets in  this  room." 

So,  night  and  day,  for  two  years,  while  a  flickering  spark  of 
life  remained,  he  tended  the  poor  wrecked  imbecile  thing  he 
knew  and  loved  as  "mother."  In  one  poor  room,  half  fed,  half 
warmed,  that  fine  soul  gave  the  best  he  had  to  the  best  he  knew. 

Those  who  despair  of  human  nature  do  not  know  the  poor, 
I  say.  All  my  life  long,  in  Ireland,  England,  Toronto,  and 
New  York,  I  constantly  came  across  the  same  sort  of  poor  peo- 
ple that  Jesus  seems  to  have  so  well  known.  The  poor  who  be- 
lieve in,  even  when  they  cannot  explain,  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  in  men. 

I  love  to  look  back  and  remember  what  a  rarely  good  time 
we  all  had  together  in  that  parish  house.  The  aim  I  pursued 
as  steadily  as  I  could  was  to  trust  everything  to  the  manage- 
ment of  the  young  people  themselves;  not  unduly  to  multiply 
organizations  (a  common  fault),  but  when  there  was  some- 
thing that  needed  doing,  choose  a  fitted  leader  or  two  for  the 
job,  and  give  him  or  them  liberty  and  responsibility  at  the 
same  time. 

Such  dance  halls  as  there  were  then  in  our  neighbourhood 
were  not  places  where  respectable  young  people  should  attend, 
yet  dancing  was  as  natural  and  necessary  as  eating  to  thousands. 
When  I  said  I  was  going  to  have  dancing  in  my  parish  house, 
I  scared  many  of  my  friends.  But  if  I  did,  I  drew  closer  to  me 
than  ever  the  young  people  I  wanted  to  win.  For  a  little  sea- 
son my  good  deaconesses  could  not  (all  of  them,  at  least)  see  it. 
I  frankly  told  them  they  should  exercise  as  free  a  judgment  as  I 
claimed,  and  if  they  could  not  conscientiously  help  me  in  this, 
I  could  not  blame  them  in  the  least.  All  I  should  ask  would  be 
that  they  should  carefully  avoid  appearing  in  any  way  to  criti- 
cize what  was  to  be  the  liberal  policy  of  the  church  in  the  mat- 
ter. 

There  was  no  evading  the  fact  that  among  the  mass  of  young 
people  who  clamorously  applauded  the  very  idea  of  the  Parish 
House  being  opened  for  dancing,  there  was  a  rough  element. 


3oo  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

It  could  not  be  otherwise.  This  needed  not  so  much  watching 
as  guiding  and  helping.  Their  intention  was  good.  We  had 
won  their  interest.  They  wanted  to  avoid  doing  any  unseemly 
thing,  but  they  did  not  know  how.  A  cigarette  end  hang- 
ing out  of  their  mouths  as  they  danced,  or  a  surreptitious 
squirting  of  tobacco  juice  into  a  quiet  corner  of  the  room, 
surely  such  things  no  lady  or  gentleman  could  object  to.  Loud 
talking,  coarse  laughing,  rude  buffoonery — these  were  the 
invariable  accompaniments  of  any  social  pleasure  they  had 
known.  In  short,  the  situation  was  delicate;  it  needed  careful 
handling,  and  the  one  thing  above  all  that  had  to  be  avoided  was 
any  appearance  of  disciplinary  suppression. 

Well,  we  made  a  great  success  of  our  dancing.  I  had  noth- 
ing to  do  with  it.  My  clergy  had  but  little.  We  were  busy  in 
other  ways.  But  Mrs.  W.  H.  Schieffelin,  with  her  gentleness 
and  charm,  Miss  Elsie  Marshall,  one  of  the  most  competent  and 
successful  organizers  of  working  girls  our  church  has  ever 
known,  Mrs.  Herbert  Satterlee  (then  Miss  Morgan),  Mrs. 
Randolph,  Mrs.  R.  M.  Bull,  Miss  Rhett,  and  so  many  others, 
I  wish  I  had  space  to  name  them,  by  their  cheerful,  patient 
presence  launched  triumphantly  our  scheme  of  most  necessary 
and  helpful  pleasure. 

In  an  astonishingly  short  time  the  scheme  took  a  natural 
shape,  and  quickly,  intelligently,  and  with  complete  success, 
St.  George's  young  working  people  issued  their  own  invitations, 
being  responsible  for  those  invited  and  their  behaviour  when 
they  came.  I  was  calling  on  an  old  lady  who  kept  a  small 
tenement  rooming  house  near  the  old  gas  works,  one  of  the 
poorest  districts  on  the  East  Side.  I  asked  her  if  she  noticed  any 
change  in  the  neighbourhood.  "  Indeed  I  do,  Doctor.  Round 
here  they  used  all  to  be  toughs  and  bums.  Now  there  is  three  or 
four  gentlemen  to  every  block."  She  seemed  conservative 
in  her  estimate. 

To  turn  from  dancing  to  our  Sexton  Hanlon1  may  seem  an 
unnecessary  study  in  contrasts,  yet  in  all  of  that  band  of  co- 
operators  whose  united  work  and  spirit  made  our  parish  home 
a  power  for  good,  none  helped  me  more  loyally  than  did  he. 

He  was  not  simply  an  efficient  official;  he  was  a  warm-hearted 
and  generous  friend,  and  his  strong,  manly  personality  was  an 

'Hanlon  came  of  an  old  North  of  Ireland  family.     They  breed  fine  men  and  women  there. 


OUR  PARISH  HOUSE  301 

influence  always  making  for  good  among  the  young  people  that 
daily  flocked  in  and  out  of  the  house  when  he  had  charge.  A 
good  man  and  a  true,  faithful  in  the  discharge  of  his  office 
and  wonderfully  patient  toward  all  men  was  Hanlon.  He 
knew  what  we  stood  for,  and  he  believed  in  it.  He  knew  the 
boys  and  girls,  and  none  had  a  truer  eye  for  the  bad  and  the 
good  among  them.  He  knew  the  city  and,  what  was  important, 
he  knew  our  Albany  Assemblyman,  and  the  police  captain  of 
the  precinct.  He  was  not  only  the  greatest  possible  help  to  me; 
on  occasion  he  was  a  wise  councillor.  When  he  suddenly  died, 
the  whole  parish  missed  and  mourned  Hanlon. 

I  will  tell  a  story  showing  the  sort  of  man  he  was — a  story 
heretofore  known  to  only  two  now  living,  John  Reichert  and 
myself.  We  thought  it  best  to  keep  it  to  ourselves.  It  is  a 
story  of  nearly  thirty  years  ago. 

One  Sunday  morning,  as  Hanlon  was  standing  in  his  usual 
place  in  front  of  the  Parish  House,  a  young  man  who  had  been 
a  member  of  the  men's  club,  but  had  left  New  York  two  years 
before  to  drive  a  locomotive  on  one  of  the  big  railroad  lines, 
came  up  to  him.  Hanlon  at  once  recognized  and  welcomed 
him,  for  he  had  been  a  favourite  with  all.  For  some  time  they 
talked,  and  as  they  did  so,  Hanlon  realized  that  there  was 
something  wrong,  and  that  the  man  was  insane.  We  had 
always  an  arrangement  with  the  police  permitting  an  officer  to 
be  within  call  on  Sunday  mornings.  Hanlon  bided  his  time 
till  the  man  of  order  should  be  at  his  elbow,  and  then,  like  a 
flash,  clasped  in  his  powerful  grip  the  engineer,  falling  on  him 
as  he  did  so.  He  was  secured  in  a  moment,  and  quietly  taken 
away  in  a  cab.  The  thing  was  done  so  quietly  that  few  saw  it, 
and  those  who  did  thought  that  a  stranger  had  fallen  in  a  fit. 

What  aroused  Hanlon 's  suspicion  first  was  that  the  engineer 
wanted  to  see  me,  insisted  on  seeing  me  at  once.  "But  the 
Rector  is  preaching,"  said  Hanlon. 

"Well,  I  must  talk  to  him  in  the  pulpit,"  and  suspiciously 
he  kept  his  hand  in  his  pocket.  Our  poor  clubman  had  a  loaded 
45-calibre  revolver  in  that  pocket.  He  was  violently  insane 
before  the  officer  got  him  to  the  hospital,  and  he  died  a  raving 
lunatic  in  a  couple  of  weeks. 

Surely  I  had  a  fine  group  of  people  round  me  in  those  days, 
and  Hanlon  did  not  lower  the  average ! 


3°2 


THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 


It  would  be  delightful  to  me  to  begin  at  the  top  of  our  build- 
ing and,  passing  through  it  all,  room  by  room,  try  to  tell  the 
story  of  what  those  who  met  in  those  rooms  strove  for.  Alas, 
space  fails  me. 

Athletic  work  among  the  boys  and  girls  I  pressed  in  every 
way  possible.  The  gymnasium  occupied  a  whole  floor,  and  to 
exercise  wise  rule  and  governance  here  I  found  a  man  after  my 
own  heart,  Ernest  Reinhardt.  Mr.  Morgan  loaned  a  large 
vacant  lot  at  Weehawken  to  the  men's  club:  a  rough,  rocky 
place  enough,  but  all  hands  turned  in  to  smooth  it,  and  a  rea- 
sonably good  running  track,  cricket  crease,  and  baseball  ground 
were  proudly  achieved. 

We  fought  for  healthy  bodies,  and  we  fought  against  the 
chief  danger,  I  hold  it,  of  our  American  athleticism — profes- 
sionalism. We  produced  some  first-class  champions  in  their 
various  classes  at  the  Metropolitan  Association  A.  A.  U.  But 
more  important  far,  we  did  something  to  raise  the  physical 
standard  (which  was  low)  of  our  neighbourhood.  And  we 
made  thousands  believe  that  the  religion  we  believed  in  had 
works  as  well  as  faith  behind  it. 

Then  there  grew  up  in  the  large  church  reading  room  an 
unusually  strong  men's  club,  and  it  busied  itself  with  the  in- 
tellectual and  social  side  of  the  parish  life.  Concerts,  plays, 
"socials,"  "smokers,"  all  such  things  the  club  produced.  The 
members  knew  what  was  wanted,  and  in  providing  it,  took  an 
immense  lot  of  work  off  the  hands  of  my  assistant  clergy,  and 
did  the  thing  far  better  than  they  (the  clergy)  could  have  done. 

The  all-important  question  of  membership  I  settled  myself. 
I  said  I  would  have  no  man,  woman,  or  child  a  member  of  any 
organization  in  our  parish  house  who  was  not  a  member  (I 
don't  mean  communicant)  of  St.  George's  Church.  I  had  op- 
position at  first.  To  some,  such  a  drastic  limitation  seemed 
both  narrow-minded  and  unwise.  It  was  neither,  I  hold.  As 
the  event  proved,  we  had  none  too  much  room  for  those  who 
wanted  to  come  into  our  church  life  and  stay  in  it,  and  we 
avoided  the  state  of  things  that  I  saw  round  me  in  the  later 
years  of  my  ministry:  fine  parish  buildings  whose  influence  on 
and  connection  with  the  membership  of  those  churches  whose 
name  they  bore  seemed  negligible. 

I  need  scarcely  say  that  my  one  aim  above  all  others,  as  I 


OUR  PARISH  HOUSE  303 

planned  our  parish  house,  was  to  stimulate  and  develop  sound 
religious  teaching  for  our  young  people.  If  we  succeeded  in 
that,  other  failures  were  unimportant;  if  we  failed  there,  no 
success  won  elsewhere  could  be  permanent. 

The  officers  of  the  school  were  first  class.  H.  H.  Pike  was 
an  extraordinarily  efficient  superintendent;  and  the  faithfulness 
of  the  rank  and  file  was  illustrated  when,  unexpectedly,  one 
winter  morning,  I  had  a  roll  call  of  teachers  taken  and  out  of 
a  total  of  one  hundred  and  sixty-four,  one  hundred  and  sixty- 
two  were  in  their  classes. 

Sunday-school  teachers  must  know  something  to  teach,  and 
must  know  how  to  teach  what  they  know.  A  good  teacher  is 
made  as  well  as  born.  Here  I  long  to  preach  a  sermon  on  the 
need  of  the  twentieth-century  child  for  religious  teaching.  I 
shall  say  simply  that  from  the  day  I  became  rector  of  St. 
George's  till  the  day  of  my  resignation  no  aim  or  purpose  in  all 
our  parish  seemed  as  important  as  was  our  ministry  to  the  chil- 
dren.    The  Sunday  School  must  come  first. 

My  "senior  clerical  assistant,"  being  only  human,  was  in- 
clined to  arrogate  to  himself  certain  rights  that  were  not  al- 
ways good  for  him,  or  his  juniors,  or  the  parish.  In  a  happy 
hour  I  got  the  idea  that  each  of  my  assistants  should  be  "sen- 
ior" one  week  at  a  time.  While  officer  of  the  week,  everything 
in  the  parish  came  to  the  senior  for  decision  before  it  came  to 
me,  even  emergency  calls.  Each  man  was  thus  constantly 
put  on  his  mettle,  and  was  pretty  severely  tested  as  to  his 
capacity.  Another  good  result  of  the  system  was  that  his 
colleagues  had  more  leisure  in  the  morning  hours  to  study  for 
three  weeks  in  the  month. 

Another  good  plan  in  regard  to  my  assistant  clergy  I  de- 
veloped. I  made  my  assistants  select  their  successors.  I 
found  if  a  man  had  worked  with  me  for  two  or  more  years,  he 
was  immensely  interested  in  securing  another  fitted  to  take  his 
place.  He  naturally  knew  a  number  of  young  clerics  that  I  had 
never  heard  of,  and  of  their  qualifications  he  was  apt  to  have  a 
better  knowledge  than  I.  In  short,  in  every  organization,  the 
one  thing  I  did  was  to  trust  those  under  me. 

If  you  want  to  help  men  themselves,  trust  them!  If  you 
want  to  get  the  best  they  can  give  you,  trust  them!  No  man, 
no  matter  how  gifted,  can  finally  succeed  if  he  will  not  trust  his 


3°4 


THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 


fellow-men.  And  it  was  because  he  never  could  trust  any  but 
his  inferiors,  and  not  even  his  inferiors  for  long,  that  Woodrow 
Wilson  made,  at  home  and  abroad,  probably  the  greatest  failure 
in  our  country's  history.  Never  did  fortune  shine  so  persist- 
ently for  any  man.  But  he  would  not  trust  his  fellows,  so  they 
came  not  to  trust  him. 

I  look  back  on  my  relations  with  the  thirty-five  assistant 
clergy  who  worked  under  me  at  St.  George's,  and  my  heart 
warms  within  me  as  I  remember  what  a  good  time  we  had  to- 
gether. Never  did  a  rector  have  better  assistants  than  did  I ! 
And  I  know  that  often  I  tried  "my  boys,"  for  my  temper  was 
hasty  and  unreasonable,  specially  in  later  years  of  my  ministry, 
when  I  was  sometimes  quite  worn  out. 

I  can  only  remember  one  row  we  had,  a  disagreement,  rather, 
and  I  am  inclined  to  think  on  that  occasion  my  clergy  were 
wiser  than  I.  I  knew  there  was  trouble  in  my  clergy  house,  and 
I  guessed  the  cause,  but  I  was  rather  taken  aback  when,  one 
morning,  one  of  the  staff  who  was  whole-heartedly  given  to  his 
work  walked  into  the  study  and  said  that  after  deliberation  he 
had  concluded  to  resign  unless  I  dismissed  one  of  my  assist- 
ants, a  very  brilliant  fellow.  I  asked  how  the  other  clergy  felt. 
He  said  they  agreed  with  him,  but  did  not  wish  to  speak  out. 

If  I  had  ridden  a  high  horse  that  morning  I  would  have  hurt 
the  church  and  wronged  "my  boys."  I  came  close  to  them  and 
asked  them  to  trust  me.  I  said  that  if  after  a  talk  with  the  man 
they  objected  to  I  felt  that  he  could  not  be  trusted,  I  would  cer- 
tainly do  as  they  wished.  threw  himself  on  me;  was  evi- 
dently sincerely  repentant  at  the  time,  and  for  a  season,  at  least, 
gave  proof  to  his  fellows  that  he  was  so.  But  I  think  I  would 
have  done  better  by  the  man  himself  and  by  St.  George's  if  I  had 
taken  his  colleagues'  advice  and  bidden  him  seek  work  elsewhere. 

I  have  written  only  of  a  few  of  the  organizations  that  grew 
in  our  Home.  Of  one,  an  inconspicuous  but  valuable  little 
agency  for  good,  I  must  tell  a  story.  Remember,  libraries 
then  were  not  common. 

Place:  our  Sunday-school  library  at  front  door. 
Time:  winter  evening. 

Books  kept  out  over  a  fortnight  had  one  cent  a  day  charged  on 
them.     Postcard  sent  one  week  after  book  due  for  return 


OUR  PARISH  HOUSE  305 

by  Miss  Bays,  our  volunteer  librarian.    Receipt  of  postcard 
means  pennies  owing. 
Little  ragged  lad  about  eleven  years  old  comes  in.     Bitter 
weather,  no  stockings  or  shoes  (this  is  rare).     Produces 
his  book  and  postcard. 

Little  ragged  lad:  "I  owe  four  pennies." 

Miss  B.  (relenting):  "Well,  Charlie,  you  can  pay  one  this 

week  and  one  next  week." 
Little  ragged  lad:  "No;  I  have  got  them  here.    I  worked  for 

them,  and  what  is  four  pennies  for  all  I  have  got  out  of 

this  book!" 

It  was  "Robinson  Crusoe."   How  old  DeFoe  would  rejoice! 

From  the  first  idea  of  it,  I  had  a  hope  that  our  parish  building 
might  help  me  to  win  labour  unionism  to  see  that  there  were 
those  in  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  who  believed  in  the 
aims  of  the  best  labour  leaders,  who  saw  clearly,  as  they  did, 
that  to  win  mere  justice  labour  must  unite,  and  as  a  unit  present 
its  claim. — "Homestead"  had  removed  for  me  all  doubts  on 
the  need  of  labour  unionism — men  must  cooperate  if  they  would 
secure  the  simplest  of  human  rights.  I  am  not  uncharitable 
nor  yet  inaccurate  when  I  say  that  the  ignorance  of  the  clergy 
and  the  indifference  of  the  religious  press  to  labour's  cry  for 
justice  was  dense  and  inexcusable. 

It  is  not  a  grateful  task  recalling  the  blindness  of  those  who 
are  gone,  but  when  I  find  people  all  round  me  full  of  pessimism 
to-day,  I  know  no  better  way  to  encourage  and  correct  them 
than  by  reminding  them  of  conditions  that  obtained  twenty- 
seven  years  ago,  which  they  are  too  young  to  have  known,  or 
have  forgotten. 

•  The  Hon.  John  Burns  (member  for  Chelsea  in  the  British 
parliament,  1895)  visited  New  York.  He  was  welcomed  at  a 
great  meeting  in  Cooper  Union,  where  I  was  invited  by  the 
labour  unions  to  speak,  and  afterward  entertained  at  a  din- 
ner, where  I  was  by  them  asked  to  speak  to  the  toast,  "The 
Church  and  Labour." 

As  everyone  knows,  John  Burns  was  leader  in  the  great 
London  Dock  Strike.     More  than  one  hundred  thousand  men 


3o6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

were  behind  him.  There  were  misery  and  want  in  London 
then,  yet  John  Burns  so  kept  his  head,  so  led  and  controlled 
that  mob  of  hungry  and  despairing  men,  that  not  one  pane  of 
glass  was  broken  in  London.  England  never  forgot  that  strike 
or  that  strike  leader.  In  after  years  he  was  a  member  of  the 
English  Government. 

The  Churchman,  the  chief  paper  in  our  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church,  took  me  to  task  for  what  I  had  done,  and  with  extraor- 
dinary ignorance  and  folly  described  Mr.  Burns  as  a  "foul- 
mouthed  agitator."     I  wrote  the  following  letter  to  the  editor:1 

To  the  Editor  of  The  Churchman: 

I  feel  very  sure  that  many  of  the  readers  of  your  paper  regret  and  deprecate, 
as  sincerely  as  I  do,  the  article  in  The  Churchman,  Jan.  12,  on  "The  Return  of 
Mr.  John  Burns."  What  ground  you  have  for  styling  Mr.  Burns  a  "foul- 
mouthed"  agitator,  who  has  no  respect  for  the  institutions  even  of  his  own 
country,  I  cannot  think.  To  say  again,  as  you  do,  that  "  as  labour  agitator 
he  has  been  trying  to  rebel  against  the  British  Government  more  or  less 
covertly,"  is  to  say  what  is  untrue,  grossly  untrue.  His  own  party  op- 
ponents in  England  would  smile  at  such  a  way  of  stating  the  case.     .     .     . 

He  is  an  extremist,  of  course;  as  such  he  naturally  holds  many  views  that 
at  present  give  rise  to  fierce  divisions  of  opinion.  But  no  one  who  knows 
anything  about  the  man  or  his  career  is  likely  to  agree  with  the  verdict  of  your 
editorial.     .     .     . 

Church  papers  make  a  mistake  when  they  pour  abuse  on  such  men. 

W.  S.  Rainsford 
St.  George's   Rectory, 
Jan.14,  1895. 

Old  Mr.  Dana,  of  the  Sun,  in  those  days  was  bent  on  proving 
that  what  New  York  wanted  in  a  paper  was  witty  blackguard- 
ism. At  the  end  of  a  long  editorial  he  summed  up  my  social 
usefulness  thus:  "Dr.  Rainsford  is  a  shallow,  harumscarum 
thinker,  and  is  a  conspicuous  representative  of  a  school  of  un- 
wise and  mischievous  social  agitators." 

Several  years  later,  I  was  asked  to  write  editorially  for  the 
New  York  Sun. 

I  would  like  to  go  on  for  many  a  page  telling  in  poor  part 
the  story  of  our  parish  life  a  generation  ago  in  that  Home.  Fine, 
full  years  those  were,  and  God  knows,  as  I  look  back  on  them, 

J'The  Return  of  Mr.  John  Burns,"  The  Churchman,  January  12,  1895. 


OUR  PARISH  HOUSE  307 

I  am  ashamed  I  did  not  do  more  with  the  golden  opportunities 
that  were  mine.  In  our  Home  were  gathered  a  most  unusual 
band  of  workers.  What  each  did  deserves  a  chapter,  and  I 
have  but  space  to  write  a  name.  But  from  Pierpont  Morgan 
to  John  Reichert,  and  from  Alexis  Stein  to  Charles  James  Wills, 
I  had  with  me  whole-hearted  men  of  purpose  and  power.  They 
bettered  my  counsels  and  forgave  my  faults. 

Unwillingly  I  must  end  my  so  imperfect  sketch  of  our  Parish 
Home.  Our  critics  and  our  friends,  when  they  visited  us,  said 
we  had  a  wonderful  organization.  But  few  saw  that  organiza- 
tion was  not  the  secret  of  our  unusual  success.  That  lay  in  the 
living  spirit  that  animated  all;  the  spirit  of  service  that  dear 
Jacob  Riis  had  so  well  named  "Salvation  by  human  touch." 
Nothing  new  in  it,  for  it  was  Jesus'  way. 

That  "radium  quality"  in  a  man  enables  him  to  sense  where 
a  great  need  exists.  I  think  we  were  among  the  first  to  see 
that  the  crowded  portions  of  our  modern  cities  need,  above 
other  needs,  community  houses.  We  tried  to  make  one. 
Lots  of  mistakes  we  made,  of  course.  But  the  aim  was  good. 
The  people  saw  that  it  was  good,  and  they  came  to  us.  Came 
not  only  as  needing  what  we  had  to  give,  but  as  bravely  anxious 
to  help  us  to  the  utmost  of  their  ability.  They  crowded  the 
place  (and  always  there  were  more  males  than  females),  and 
they  crowded  the  church,  too. 

In  1899,  we  had  a  regular  housecleaning.  We  cut  out  all 
the  dead  timber  we  could  find,  removing  from  our  roll  all  doubt- 
ful members,  with  this  result: 

St.  George's  Members  and  Attendants 

Living  in  tenement  houses  5>°34 

In  boarding  houses  891 

In  flats,  apartments,  hotels  834 

In  private  houses  537 
(this  included  domestic  servants) 

Only  forty-nine  families  were  then  living  in  houses  of  their 
own  of  fourteen  feet  frontage  and  above.  The  majority  of  the 
537  were  domestics,  living  with  people  who  did  not  attend  St. 
George's. 

In  the  sixteen  years,  between  1883  and  1899,  our  communi- 


3o8  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

cants  had  increased  from  less  than  two  hundred  to  over  four 
thousand. 

Including  gifts  to  the  church  endowment,  we  had  raised 
$2,000,000.  On  Sunday  our  collections  were  not  quite  so  large 
as  formerly,  as  the  rush  of  strangers  had  ceased,  and  few  very 
rich  people  joined  us.  But  even  so,  in  1898  and  1899,  each 
year  our  gifts  to  foreign  and  domestic  missions  amounted 
to  nearly  #8,000. 

We  had  made  good  in  local  missionary  work,  for  we  had 
won  the  confidence  and  support  of  the  best  element  among  the 
youth  of  the  neighbourhood.  The  boys  and  girls  we  had  set 
out  to  reach  years  before  had  grown  to  men  and  women,  and 
now  thronged  our  gymnasium  and  athletic  clubs,  and  very 
many  of  them  were  whole-souled  members  of  the  church. 

Ernest  Reinhardt,  my  indefatigable  assistant,  gave  special 
attention  to  training  wrestlers,  and  in  that  field  the  clever 
medium-sized  East  Sider  developed  a  quite  extraordinary 
proficiency.  So  much  so  that  several  times,  and  in  several 
classes  of  competitors,  we  won  not  only  a  Metropolitan  cham- 
pionship, but  also  the  championship  of  the  United  States.  Mr. 
Reinhardt  wrote  without  exaggeration  in  his  report  to  me  in 
1899:  "We  are  now  looked  upon  as  having  in  our  club  the  best 
wrestlers  up  to  125  pounds  in  America." 

And  just  think  of  it!  Some  of  those  dear  fellows  in  our 
"gym"  were  in  that  crowd  of  little  "toughs"  that,  on  August 
4, 1883,  laid  me  flat  on  the  floor  in  our  Avenue  A  saloon.  Yes, 
the  church  made  the  Parish  Home,  and  the  Home  remade  the 
church.  All  classes  of  people  who  made  up  the  city's  life 
met  in  our  Parish  Home,  and  so  met  that  they  came  to  know 
one  another  better  and  to  respect  and  understand  one  an- 
other more. 

What  was  accomplished  a  generation  ago,  by  inexperienced 
if  whole-hearted  people  of  all  classes  and  of  many  creeds,  can 
be,  should  be,  must  be  done  in  every  city  and  town,  if  our 
American  democracy  is  to  survive.  "Getting"  cannot  bind 
men  together.  Nothing  but  men  of  "Good  Will"  whose  lives 
are  a  "giving"  can.  Many  mistakes  we  made,  and  I,  the 
leader,  made  more  than  my  share.  But  we  had  all  of  us  an 
honest  and  self-sacrificing  spirit  of  service,  and  it  was  that 
which  won. 


OUR  PARISH  HOUSE  309 

The  old  altars  are  falling.  Let  us  build  the  new,  and  over 
them  let  us  place  the  everlasting  name  of  Jesus,  the  Supreme 
Servant  of  Mankind. 

He  chose  His  own  altar.  It  was  a  cross;  and  at  that  altar 
mankind  will  worship  long  after  it  has  ceased  to  believe  in  or  to 
honour  the  impossibly  partial,  unworshipful  God  that  all  the 
orthodoxies  still  persist  in  presenting  to  it  to-day. 

Oh,  King  of  Earth,  thy  cross  ascend, 
O'er  climes  and  ages  'tis  thy  throne. 

— James  Martineau. 


CHAPTER  XXI 

New  York 
1890-1906 

The  ten  years  from  1890  to  1900  were  the  fullest  years  in  my 
life.  If  a  man  can  do  any  solid  work,  he  should  be  able  to 
accomplish  it  between  forty  and  fifty. 

In  those  years  I  was  more  free  to  take  part  in  extra  parochial 
matters  than  had  been  possible  during  the  first  years  of  my 
rectorship. 

The  machinery  of  the  parish  was  now  in  good  order.  My 
people  were  extraordinarily  faithful  and  efficient.  I  can  recall 
no  jars  or  jealousies  within  or  without.  Clerical  antagonism 
to  what  St.  George's  stood  for,  if  still  visible,  was  a  party  affair, 
and  the  larger  number  of  the  clergy  the  country  over  gave  us 
an  enthusiastic  support.  Even  the  General  Theological  Semi- 
nary students  no  longer  shunned  us.  They  came  constantly 
to  the  parish  building,  and  once  a  year  I  invited  the  whole 
student  body  to  spend  the  evening  with  my  assistant  clergy. 
Then  I  gave  them  a  good  supper  and  a  good  cigar,  and  after 
having  by  such  means  sugared  my  pill,  filled  them  as  full  of 
sociological  and  ecclesiastical  heresy  as  I  could  at  one  sitting. 
All  over  the  country  clergy  have  kindly  reminded  me  of  those 
evenings. 

I  had  by  this  time,  too,  succeeded  in  gathering  to  my  aid  a 
very  superior  class  of  assistant  clergy,  picked  out  in  the  way 
I  have  spoken  of.  These  young  men,  living  together  in  the 
comfortable  and  spacious  quarters  Mr.  Morgan  had  provided 
in  the  upper  story  of  the  Parish  House,  were  able,  in  an 
unostentatious  way,  to  entertain  young  clergy  visiting  the 
city,  as  well  as  the  assistant  clergy  of  New  York  parishes. 
Apropos  of  this  pleasant  privilege  of  ours,  I  remember  what  a 
happy  laugh  we  had,  when  one  morning  a  young  Canadian 

310 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  311 

Evangelical  parson,  Dysor  Hague,  a  friend  of  mine,  a  good 
fellow,  staying  in  the  Parish  House  over  night,  came  in  to 
breakfast  at  the  rectory  a  few  minutes  late,  to  find  to  his 
evident  amazement  the  rector  seated  at  the  breakfast  table 
with  Fathers  Maturin  and  Osborne,  of  course  in  the  dress  of 
their  order,  seated  beside  him.  The  amazement  of  the  Cana- 
dian was  so  evident  that  I  burst  into  a  roar  of  laughter,  and 
after  that  we  had  a  most  pleasant  time  together. 

Thus  the  clergy  house  helped  to  give  the  things  we  stood 
for  a  very  widespread  recognition  indeed. 

I  saw  a  good  deal  of  Doctor  Huntington,  rector  of  Grace 
Church.  We  were  near  neighbours,  and  once  I  gave  him  help 
in  a  rather  amusing  way. 

A  sweet-faced  lady  of  middle  age  called  on  me  with  a  note 
from  Doctor  Huntington  one  day.  The  note  said,  "The 
bearer  is  known  to  me.  She  is  a  lady  of  Christian  character 
and  wishes  to  be  confirmed.  I  have  advised  her  to  go  to  your 
confirmation  class." 

This  was  mystifying,  but  my  visitor  gave  me  at  once  the 
explanation.  She  had  attended  Grace  Church  for  years,  and 
Grace  Church  confirmation  class  for  two  years,  but  she  could 
not,  try  as  she  would,  accept  the  dogma  of  the  Virgin  birth  of 
our  Lord.  Failing  to  accept  it,  Doctor  Huntington  said  he 
could  not  recommend  her  to  the  Bishop  for  Confirmation.  This 
distressed  her  extremely,  for  she  greatly  desired  to  join  the 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church.  In  no  other  did  she  feel  so  much 
at  home.  "Well,"  said  Doctor  Huntington,  "I  cannot  send 
you  up,  but  I  will  give  you  a  letter  to  Doctor  Rainsford."  So 
she  came  to  me.  I  had  taught  for  a  long  time  that  the  theory 
of  the  miraculous  birth  of  Jesus  was  evidently  not  known  to 
St.  Paul,  and  was  in  all  probability  a  later  and  most  natural 
approximation  of  the  early  Christian  thought  to  that  Eastern 
conception  of  divine  incarnation,  which  had  obtained  wide  ac- 
ceptance before  Jesus  was  born.  Moreover,  I  contended,  a 
half  man  could  never  be  example  and  guide,  be  tempted  in  all 
points  as  we  were.  Complete  manhood  the  Son  of  Man  claimed 
for  himself.  I  could  not  ascribe  any  other  to  Him,  or  dare  to 
give  Him  less,  and  if  he  was  not  Joseph's  son  he  was  not  wholly 
human,  etc.,  etc.  Well,  the  dear  lady  was  in  due  course  con- 
firmed, and  after  that  communicated  at  Grace  Church.     So  I 


312 


THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 


made  it  easier  for  her  to  have  what  she  longed  for,  and  from 
the  hands  she  would  have  chosen. 

The  prosperity  of  our  own  work  and  the  peace  and  good 
will  reigning  in  our  organizations  made  it  possible  for  me  to 
take  some  interest  in  matters  that  had  no  direct  relation  to  my 
church.  For  eight  years  I  had  set  myself  to  a  task  that  re- 
quired all  I  had  to  give  to  it,  my  own  local  business.  If  I 
could  not  make  a  success  locally,  I  could  not  succeed  at  all. 
(i)  Could  the  poor,  the  unorganized  poor,  be  reached  by  the 
church  and  helped?  (2)  Could  the  organized  and  semi- 
organized  wage  earners  be  drawn  back  to  the  church? 

These  two  problems  had  been  faced.  If  we  had  not  solved 
them  we  had  at  least  shown  that  they  were  solvable. 

So  long  as  the  success  of  St.  George's  was  uncertain,  I  felt  I 
had  no  right  to  go  outside  my  own  "bailiwick."  Now  I  was 
freer  to  take  a  wider  view  of  the  city's  needs — and  to  urge  on 
those  who  would  listen  the  best  ways  of  meeting  them. 

If  I  had  to  face  criticism  not  always  just  when  I  was  doing 
my  own  parish  work  after  my  own  ideas,  it  was  certain  I  must 
be  prepared  to  meet  more  criticism  and  harsher  when  I  ven- 
tured into  a  wider  field.  However,  I  was  young  and  successful 
and  had  many  friends  and  a  great  body  of  convinced  workers 
behind  me  who  trusted  me,  so  it  did  not  require  much  courage 
to  go  forward — and  I  went. 

Poverty  then  in  New  York  was  dreadful.  In  the  April 
Forum,  1891,  I  wrote  an  article,  "What  Can  We  Do  for  the 
Poor?"  It  was  quoted  widely.  I  must  here  content  myself 
by  quoting  one  sentence  from  it  only: 

The  whole  aspect  of  modern  Protestant  churches  in  our  large  cities,  into 
which  the  tide  of  workers  flows  steadily,  is  neglectful  of  and  repellent  to  the 
self-respecting  wage  earner.  The  best  churches,  the  strongest  organizations, 
have  deliberately  deserted  the  field  when  the  battle  is  hardest,  and  have 
sought  comfort  and  ease  in  the  society  of  the  rich.  As  organizations  stimu- 
lating Christian  culture  for  those  who  choose  to  attend  and  support  them, 
they  answer  their  purpose  well  enough.  But  as  embodying  in  any  real  sense 
the  comprehensive  and  aggressive  mission  of  a  living  Christian  body  to  these 
times  and  conditions  of  ours,  they  are  hollow  mockeries  and  an  utter  failure. 

So  much  was  true  when  I  wrote  it.  And  so  far  as  the  Prot- 
estant Episcopal  Church  is  concerned,  it  is  generally  true 
to-day,  in  1922.     A  few  there  are,  Bishop  Williams  of  Michi- 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  313 

gan  for  instance,  and  a  small,  well-informed,  resolute  band  of 
clergy  who,  in  spite  of  misrepresentation  and  abuse,  are  doing 
all  that  brave  men  can  do  to  save  our  church  from  the  curse  of 
social  respectability. 

In  the  early  '90's  I  was  practically  alone  among  the  clergy 
in  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  in  attacking  the  social 
conditions  among  the  poor — and  the  rich,  too — in  New  York. 
It  seems  strange  now,  but  the  fact  was  that  the  clerical  mind 
was  then  occupied  with  other  things,  trifling  in  their  importance 
when  compared  with  the  momentous  thing  that  was  slowly 
being  enacted  before  eyes  that  could  not,  would  not  see.  The 
wage  earner  on  one  side,  the  capitalist  and  the  professions  on 
the  other,  were  ceasing  to  understand  each  other.  A  truce  of 
ignorance  might  be  followed  by  a  war  of  hate.  The  Church 
was  God's  "daysman"  between  them,  but  she  shirked  the  job. 
Her  hour  of  opportunity  came  and  went.  I  doubt  that  it  will 
ever  return.     It  cannot  till  she  has  a  great  house-cleaning. 

Marshal  Foch  says  that  the  army  that  loses  the  initiative 
is  already  beaten.  The  Church  in  America  and  England  lost 
the  initiative  between  1830  and  1890. 

Ever  since  I  left  Cambridge,  I  had  read  rather  widely  on 
Cooperation  as  a  possible  move  in  the  Industrialism  of  the  fu- 
ture. Sedley  Taylor,  brave,  brilliant  pioneer  that  he  was,  had 
moved  some  of  us  to  undertake  some  study  of  it  in  1870.  Think- 
ing the  subject  might  offer  some  variety  to  the  occasionally 
rather  monotonous  fare  of  clerical  discussion,  I  read  a  paper 
on  Cooperation  at  "the  Club."  I  don't  think  it  was  a  bad 
paper,  but  it  fell  flat.  The  truth  was,  no  one  knew  enough 
about  the  subject  even  to  start  a  discussion  of  it,  except 
Doctor  Henry.  My  Forum  article,  however,  drew  fire,  and 
from  the  quarter  I  expected.  Doctor  Dix  of  Trinity  came  out 
with  a  public  letter  in  which  he  said,  "I  have  no  confidence  in 
the  judgment  or  wisdom  of  those  who  tell  us  that  the  Church 
must  reach  the  masses,  purify  politics,  elevate  the  labour 
classes." 

My  relations  with  Doctor  Dix  were  always  pleasant,  and  at 
this  time,  though  I  did  not  know  him  well,  I  quite  understood 
that  there  was  nothing  whatever  personal  in  his  criticism.  He 
was  but  defending  a  view  of  the  Church's  duty  that  was  then 
held  by  ninety-nine  clergy  out  of  a  hundred  and  by  most  of  its 


3 14  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

prominent  laymen.  Admiral  Mahan,  who  had  been  a  help 
to  me  at  St.  George's  from  the  first,  whose  kindly  and  exceed- 
ingly able  criticism  of  my  sermons  and  doings  generally  I  wel- 
comed, told  me  that,  feeling  that  I  placed  both  in  my  work 
and  my  preaching  an  excessive  emphasis  on  the  humanitarian 
side  of  religion,  he  thought  it  better  to  go  with  his  family  to 
another  church. 

Speaking  of  Doctor  Dix,  I  like  to  recall  that,  as  time  went  on, 
he  modified  his  views  as  to  the  Church's  social  obligations  in 
New  York.  Certainly  he  very  warmly  praised  St.  George's 
work  some  years  after  the  letter  from  which  I  have  quoted  ap- 
peared. I  had  just  returned  from  a  visit  to  Nashville,  where  I 
had  been  holding  a  fortnight's  mission  in  Doctor  Manning's 
Church.  I  was  breakfasting  with  Mr.  Morgan,  as  I  did  gen- 
erally once  a  week. 

J.  P.  M. — "Doctor  Dix  is  looking  everywhere  for  a  vicar  for 
St.  Agnes's  Chapel;  he  cannot  find  the  man  he  wants." 

W.  S.  R. — "Well,  I  think  my  host  at  Nashville  might  fill  his 
bill  admirably.  He  is  a  moderate  High  Churchman,  but  he  is  in 
touch  with  men." 

J.  P.  M. — "Well,  why  not  go  to  Dix  and  tell  him  of  the 
man?" 

W.  S.  R. — "Why,  Doctor  Dix  would  not  listen  to  any  sug- 
gestion of  mine  for  a  place  so  important." 

J.  P.  M. — "You  are  quite  wrong.  I  know  for  certain  he  will 
be  thankful  for  any  suggestion  you  may  make.  Go  down  to 
the  rectory  right  now." 

So  I  went.  Doctor  Dix  received  me.  He  had  not  heard,  he 
told  me,  of  my  friend,  Doctor  Manning,  of  Nashville,  and  I 
told  him  why  and  how  I  had  come  straight  from  Mr.  Morgan's 
breakfast  table.  He  was  most  polite  in  thanking  me  for  my  call. 
Shortly  after,  my  friend  became  vicar  of  St.  Agnes's  Chapel. 

I  made  a  public  appeal  to  the  authorities  for  the  opening  of 
the  Metropolitan  Art  Galleries  on  Sundays,  free  to  the  people. 
That  got  me  into  trouble  of  a  superficial  sort.  Then  Heber 
Newton  and  I  were  to  be  presented  to  the  Bishop  of  the  Diocese 
for  breaking  canon  law  inasmuch  as  we  had  invited  clergy  of 
denominations  other  than  our  own  to  preach  in  our  pulpits. 
That,  too,  blew  over.  My  friends  at  the  General  Seminary 
drew  up  a  list  of  things  done  amiss  and  things  undone,  but  the 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  315 

Bishop  must  have  pigeonholed  it.  These  trifling  matters  are 
not  worth  dwelling  on.  How  strangely  far  away  they  sound 
now!  But  I  do  want  to  give  some  account  of  the  life  of  the 
city  as  I  saw  it  and  moved  in  it  then,  and  of  some  few  of  the 
very  many  who  helped  to  make  working  and  fighting  finely 
worth  while. 

To  a  casual  observer  things  had  a  discouraging  look  in  New 
York  City.  The  standards  of  right  and  wrong  in  public  duty 
were  low.  The  man  who  made  money  was  listened  to  and  was 
popular.  How  he  made  it  did  not  matter.  Abram  Hewitt, 
who  had  served  his  country  in  Washington  and  his  city  in  the 
City  Hall,  with  singular  ability  and  utter  disinterestedness, 
was,  when  his  term  of  office  expired,  as  completely  forgotten 
as  though  he  lived  in  Europe.  For  what  he  had  done  few 
thanked  or  honoured  him. 

William  C.  Whitney,  who  used  his  many  gifts  and  his  im- 
mense influence,  social  and  political,  to  grasp  the  surface 
railroad  system  of  the  city,  and,  having  squeezed  for  himself 
a  great  fortune  out  of  it,  handed  it  back  to  its  owner,  the  tax- 
payer, full  of  dirty  water,  was  a  citizen  whom  the  despoiled 
municipality  delighted  to  honour. 

Yet  even  then,  the  common  folks,  the  multitude,  seemingly 
so  inert,  so  voiceless,  so  misled,  were  waiting  for  a  leader,  a 
teacher,  and  a  guide. 

When  he  was  most  needed,  he  came— one  of  those  preachers 
of  righteousness  that  men  have  always  believed  in — and  will 
always  believe  in  because  they  are  so  made — and  cannot  help 
it.  His  voice  was  not  beautiful,  but  it  carried.  His  message 
was  not  eloquent,  yet  it  was  rarely  inspiring  and  conclusive — 
He  was  destined  to  lead  not  only  his  own  party  but  all  parties. 
It  is  but  simple  truth  to  say  that  for  twenty  years  Theodore 
Roosevelt  was  the  paramount  influence  in  the  United  States. 

He  was  more  than  a  great  president,  he  was  the  greatest 
preacher  of  righteousness  this  country  had  known.  Who  that 
watched  his  steady  conquest  of  the  hearts  and  judgments  of 
his  countrymen  could  remain  pessimistic  as  to  the  future  of  a 
people  he  led  and  taught  ?  Men  followed  and  trusted  and  loved 
and  bitterly  mourned  Roosevelt  because  he  was  good.  At  the 
long  last  nothing  draws,  nothing  succeeds,  nothing  pays  like 


3i6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

goodness — for  men  long  to  be  good,  and  only  in  goodness  can 
we  find  happiness  and  peace.  In  the  days  I  am  writing  of 
Theodore  Roosevelt  had  not  yet  found  himself,  and  I  must  not 
branch  off  on  that  part  of  my  story  here. 

I  tried  to  go  to  the  Century  on  Saturday  nights, '  for  the 
old  Century  in  East  15th  Street  was  the  best,  the  most  interest- 
ing club  I  ever  put  my  foot  in.  When  Clarence  King  was  in 
New  York,  he  reigned  there  without  a  rival  on  Saturday  nights. 
Never  anywhere  or  at  any  time  have  I  heard  a  conversationalist 
so  versatile,  so  brilliantly  clever,  and  with  so  complete  a  com- 
mand of  himself  and  his  subject  under  all  circumstances  of 
verbal  exchange.  I  give  an  instance  of  his  wit.  A  group  of 
men  were  watching  a  game  of  billiards.  E.  L.  Godkin  was 
one  of  the  players,  and  King  was  looking  on.  Godkin  and 
King  were  friends;  but  like  most,  Clarence  King  often  took 
exception  to  Godkin's  policies  in  the  Evening  Post,  and  of  his 
treatment  both  of  his  friends  and  of  his  enemies  in  that  paper. 

Presently  Godkin  fumbled  a  stroke.  Quick  as  a  flash, 
Clarence  King  said  quietly:  "A  regular  Evening  Post  shot, 
Godkin;  too  much  English,  and  on  the  wrong  side." 

Lawrence  Godkin  told  me  long  afterward  that  his  father 
loved  to  repeat  the  story. 

When  Clarence  King  crossed  swords  with  Mr.  Hitchcock, 
of  the  Sun,  who,  like  Charles  Dana,  its  owner,  was  wont  to 
assume  the  role  of  a  political  Mephistopheles,  a  circle  would 
gradually  gather  round,  till  the  room  was  full  of  silent  men 
listening  to  Clarence  King.  It  was  a  unique  tribute  paid  to  a 
quite  extraordinary  brilliancy  of  wit,  wisdom,  and  learning. 

Charles  Tracy,  my  senior  warden,  got  me  into  the  Century 
before  any  one  but  himself  knew  anything  about  me,  and  I 
was  most  fortunate  to  get  into  it  as  early  as  I  did.  It  was  an 
uncertain  club;  a  man  might  be  eligible  in  every  way,  and  not 
get  past  the  committee  on  admissions  for  years.  I  was  of 
course  only  a  listener  on  Saturdays,  but  I  went  because  it  was 
the  only  place  I  knew  of  where  no  one  hesitated  to  say  out 
what  he  felt  about  anything,  and  where  questions  of  the  hour 
were  freely  debated. 

At  the  Players  you  also  met  men  worth  meeting,  and  at  times 
the  talk  was  good.  There  I  met  Augustus  St.  Gaudens,  and 
was  attracted  to  him,  though  I  never  had  the  good  fortune  to 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  317 

know  him  well.  His  youth  had  been  a  hard  youth,  and  he 
showed  it.  Some  early  influence  had  given  him  a  set  against 
all  churches  and  the  Christian  religion.  To  him  that  faith 
was  but  the  statement  of  a  lying  creed.  Once  I  asked  him  if  he 
had  ever  read  the  words  of  Jesus.     He  said  no. 

When  Phillips  Brooks  died,  all  Boston,  delighted  with  St. 
Gaudens's  Shaw  Memorial,  would  have  him  do  Brooks.  Now 
St.  Gaudens  had  never  seen  Brooks,  and  had  never,  I  think, 
been  in  a  church  since  he  was  married.  He  hated  churches, 
and  said  so.  Moreover,  Brooks's  figure  and  face  did  not  lend 
themselves  as  a  ready  subject  to  a  sculptor  who  was  a  realist 
as  was  St.  Gaudens.  However,  St.  Gaudens  accepted.  Hav- 
ing done  so,  he  had  to  get  acquainted  with  Brooks  and  the 
Brooks  tradition  and  setting.  He  had  to  visit  Trinity  Church, 
Boston;  had  to  visualize  the  great  preacher.  All  this  he  con- 
scientiously tried  to  do.  But  the  result  did  not  satisfy  him. 
Then  a  new  idea  came  to  the  artist.  He  would  place  in  the 
setting  of  his  subject  the  token  of  that  subject's  inspiration. 
He  would  place  the  Master's  suggested  face  near  his  great  ser- 
vant who  preached  of  Him.  Thus  it  was  that  St.  Gaudens 
came  to  look  for  some  actual  possible  idea  of  Jesus,  the  leader 
and  inspirer  of  Phillips  Brooks. 

So,  for  the  first  time,  he  read  the  words  of  Jesus;  read  them 
with  wonder,  and  with  profound  admiration.  Thus  St.  Gau- 
dens, the  true  artist,  the  lover  of  truth,  came  to  see  by  the  good 
way  of  his  own  professional  honesty  that  Jesus  who  claimed 
all  truthseekers  as  His  kin.  He  saw  and  believed,  but  life's 
tragedy  lay  heavy  on  him,  and  mortal  disease  crippled  a  hand 
that  could  no  longer  do  its  master's  bidding. 

When  he  was  dying  at  Cornish,  N.  H.,  they  carried  him  out 
to  a  place  he  loved,  from  which  he  used  to  see  the  sun  set.  He 
said:  "It  is  very  beautiful,  but  I  want  to  go  farther  away." 

New  York's  fashionable  life  was  rapid,  inert,  uneducated,  and 
quite  without  purpose,  a  mockery  of  what  society  might  be  in  the 
growing  metropolis  of  a  nation.  The  more  socially  prominent 
people  were  the  more  anxious  they  seemed  to  be  to  avoid  doing 
or  saying  anything  out  of  the  most  ordinary,  ordinary.  Con- 
versation was  confined  to  trivialities.  People  chattered,  they 
did  not  talk.     If  a  real  topic  came  up,  the  timidity  of  the  dinner 


318  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

table  was  amusing.  Nine  out  of  ten  hemmed  and  hawed, 
waiting  to  see  what  way  the  host  or  the  biggest  man  present 
felt  about  it  before  venturing  to  commit  themselves.  Big 
things  were  being  planned  and  done,  but  it  was  bad  form  to 
speak  of  them. 

So,  as  I  say,  dining  out  among  the  Four  Hundred  or  those 
whose  aspirations  lay  that  way,  unless  you  had  some  special  rea- 
son for  going,  was  a  waste  of  time. 

But  there  was  one  hospitable  corner,  in  the  top  story  of  an 
old  house  on  Fifth  Avenue,  near  31st  Street,  where  once  a 
month  I  was  lucky  enough  to  meet  some  of  the  choicest  spirits 
of  the  town.  The  apartment  belonged  to  Bobby  Russell,  and 
he  seemed  to  know  all  the  young  fellows,  and  the  old  fellows 
always  young,  best  worth  knowing  in  the  city.  Alas!  he  is  dead 
and  has  left  no  competent  successor  that  I  know  of.  Story 
telling  was  the  special  feature  when  we  met,  and  such  stories! 
Hopkinson  Smith  generally  had  the  chair,  and  well  he  filled  it. 
Jim  Barnes  ran  him  close.  We  all  brought  our  own  tobacco, 
and  our  genial  host  supplied  the  beer.  Nothing  stronger,  was 
the  rule  of  the  house. 

There  was  no  club.  Those  who  met  were  of  Russell's  choos- 
ing, and  we  seldom  were  more  than  a  dozen.  But  such  nights 
I  never  had  or  heard  of  anywhere  else.  Celebrities  from  other 
cities  and  other  lands  sometimes  came.  Here  I  first  met 
Kipling.  The  post  card  calling  us  together  said  he  was  to  be 
there.  Kipling's  "Seven  Seas"  was  just  out — to  my  mind  the 
best  volume  of  poetry  he  ever  wrote — and  we  were  all  perhaps 
just  a  little  sore  over  his  smashing  poem  on  the  "American 
spirit"  in  it.  The  little  Great  Man  came  late,  that  was  his 
way,  and  made  no  apology.  He  was  gruff,  almost  to  rudeness, 
I  thought.  Said  he  could  stay  only  twenty  minutes,  as  Mrs. 
Kipling  was  expecting  him.  Then  he  sat  down  on  the  sofa, 
tucking  his  legs  up  under  him.  After  a  little  general  talk,  he 
told  a  story.  Someone  capped  it.  Kipling  told  another,  and 
then  the  best  fellows  there  got  off  their  best,  but  in  so  quiet,  so 
unostentatiously  modest  a  way,  that  I  was  filled  with  admira- 
tion at  the  way  the  thing  was  done.  Not  one  bit  of  bragging 
in  it,  and  a  fine  suggested  deference  to  the  acknowledged  great- 
ness of  our  guest. 

Kipling  fell  silent,  and  sat  there  on  the  sofa,  rocking  himself 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  319 

slowly  backward  and  forward,  till  the  night  was  far  on.  It  was 
late  when  we  broke  up.  Kipling  forgot  the  appointment  he  had 
with  his  wife,  and  as  at  last  we  separated,  he  said  whole-heart- 
edly to  Russell:  "You  fellows  have  given  me  a  great  time.  I 
don't  think  I  ever  had  an  evening  like  this  in  my  life." 

Later  Mrs.  Rainsford  and  I  met  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Kipling  at  our 
friend  Lockwood  de  Forest's  house  on  16th  Street.  Mrs.  de 
Forest  had  a  very  fine  cat.  Cats  always  love  my  wife,  and  this 
one  leaped  on  her  lap  as  she  sat  on  the  sofa  by  Mr.  Kipling 
after  dinner.     As  the  cat  leaped  up  Kipling  shrank  back. 

"Why,"  said  my  wife,  "you  don't  like  cats,  Mr.  Kipling,  and 
you  write  so  much  about  them." 

"No,"  said  Kipling.  "I  don't  like  cats,  and  I  don't  care  for 
animals  at  all;  that  is  why  I  write  about  imaginary  ones." 

I  paid  two  visits  to  England  in  the  '90's,  and  things  looked  to 
me  in  Europe  as  in  America.  Vast  fortunes  sprouted  like 
mushrooms  out  of  the  earth  suddenly,  and  an  unscrupulous  ac- 
quisitiveness worked  its  will,  not  in  individuals  only,  but  in  na- 
tions. Parliaments  as  well  as  societies  worshipped  those  who 
did  things.  They  were  the  kings  of  the  hour.  Cecil  Rhodes 
was  the  most  unscrupulous  man  in  England  and  the  most 
popular,  because  he  was  an  "Empire  builder."  When  Doctor 
Jameson,  who  led  the  raid  Cecil  Rhodes  had  planned,  and  the 
Jewish  mining  magnates  of  the  Rand  had  financed,  a  rush  of 
five  hundred  cavalry  across  the  frontier  of  a  peaceable  colony, 
having  as  its  object  the  capture  of  its  legislature,  all  England 
crowded  the  Criminal  Court  where  he  was  on  trial,  to  do  honour 
to  a  buccaneer  who,  according  to  all  rule  of  civilized  govern- 
ment, ought  to  have  been  shot.  The  fashion  and  beauty  of 
London  joined  in  that  unparalleled  exhibition  of  immoral 
hysteria. 

But  England,  the  true  England,  lived,  as  the  peace  terms  she 
gave  to  the  conquered  Boers  proved  to  them  and  to  the  world. 

And  then  happened  something  that  had  never  in  the  history 
of  free  nations  happened  before.  The  very  Boers  who  so 
valiantly  had  defied  her  when  she  was  wrong  rallied  to  her, 
fought  for  her,  and  died  for  her  only  a  few  short  years  after, 
when  she  was  right. 

We  are  sinful  men,  all  of  us,  but  the  God  in  us  is  hard  to  kill. 

England's  special  brand  of  materialism  did  not  tempt  us  in 


32o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE' 

New  York.  With  us  Jameson  raids  were  impossible.  We 
were  not  tempted  to  conquer  outside  countries.  The  bounds 
of  our  own  splendid  land  were  empire  enough.  But  in  those 
years  we  were  worshipping  in  our  American  way  that  same 
dirty  god  of  the  material. 

Yes,  big,  bad  things  were  being  put  through  in  New  York. 
Vast  fortunes  were  made  by  means  which,  if  they  were  em- 
ployed now,  would  land  their  makers  in  jail.  But  New  York 
bowed  to  the  men  who  did  big  things.  She  drew  the  line  at 
Jake  Sharp,  and  put  him  in  prison  because  he  bribed  with  cash. 
She  had  nothing  worse  than  silence  for  the  Whitneys,  Widen- 
ers,  Ryans,  Havemeyers,  etc.,  who  were  Jake  Sharp's  more 
clever  successors  in  the  business  of  grabbing  public  utilities 
and  squeezing  fortunes  out  of  them. 

Here  I  will  tell  a  story  which  explains  partly  why  then  and 
why  now,  when  leaders  are  needed  dreadfully,  those  naturally 
fitted  to  serve  as  such  are  not  always  on  hand  and,  consequently, 
your  always  ready  crank,  or  your  half-experienced,  half-trained 
reformer  goes  to  the  front,  and  does  as  much  harm  as  good. 

I  was  asked  to  speak  at  a  great  meeting  in  Cooper  Union: 
a  meeting  of  protest  against  city  conditions — Tammany  condi- 
tions they  were  then  called.  This  was  at  the  beginning  of  the 
campaign  to  elect  William  L.  Strong,  1895.  I  had  won  a  hear- 
ing on  the  East  Side,  and  in  my  church  membership  were 
hundreds  of  "regular"  Tammany  men.  They  were  Demo- 
crats. They  had  to  belong  to  some  political  organization,  and 
so  they  joined  Tammany,  and  I  did  not  blame  them.  It  was 
the  fashion  to  denounce  Tammany  then,  but  everyone  who 
knew  anything  of  the  inwardness  of  city  politics  knew  that,  as 
between  the  two  political  machines,  Senator  Piatt's  and 
Croker's,  there  was  nothing  to  choose. 

There  was  a  great  crowd.  J.  E.  Parsons  was  in  the  chair, 
Joseph  Choate,  Mr.  James  Carter,  then  head  of  the  New  York 
Bar,  and  others  whose  names  I  have  forgotten,  were  speakers. 
From  start  to  finish,  the  meeting  was  an  attack  on  Tammany 
Hall.  There  was  great  applause.  I  happened  to  come  on  near 
the  end,  and  what  I  said  won  no  cheers. 

We  would  accomplish  nothing  by  merely  abusing  voters  of  another  party. 
Your  cheering  proves  to  me  that  you  are  largely  Republicans.    Well,  if  so, 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  321 

you  know  that  your  Piatt  machine  is  just  as  much  out  for  the  officers,  just 
as  corrupt,  just  as  inefficient,  as  is  Croker's.  There  is  nothing  to  be  gained 
by  abuse  of  enemies.  You  must  go  to  the  city  with  a  cause,  something  to 
fight  for,  some  definite  good  to  win.  Nothing  of  this  sort  has  been  named  here 
to-night.  But  I  tell  you  there  is  such  a  prize  to  be  won — something  that 
every  voter  here  is  interested  in  winning.  Your  property  is  in  danger, 
your  own  property,  as  much  yours  as  the  dollars  in  your  pocket.  The  street 
railroads  of  this  city  are  of  great  value  to-day.  As  the  city  grows  they  will 
enormously  increase  in  value.  Their  income  should  be  used  to  reduce  the 
rents  and  taxes  you  people  must  pay.    They  are  being  taken  from  you  to-day. 

I  spoke  for  only  fifteen  or  twenty  minutes,  and  catcalls  and 
jeering  in  plenty  greeted  my  close. 

Mr.  Joseph  Choate  was  very  kind  to  me  in  those  days.  His 
son  used  to  spend  an  occasional  hour  in  my  study.  We  walked 
uptown  together  after  the  meeting.  Presently  he  put  his 
arm  through  mine  and  said  (I  wrote  his  words  down  at  the  time), 
"You  are  perfectly  right.  What  you  said  to-night  was  true. 
The  campaign  for  reform  should  be  fought  on  that  issue.  But, 
Rainsford,  you  cannot  count  on  John  E.  or  Carter  or  me  to  help 
in  it,  for  we  are  all  retained." 

Each  profession  needs  to  do  its  own  reforming.  Each  of  us  is 
inclined  to  tell  the  man  of  another  profession  how  to  reform 
himself  and  it.  Lawyer,  doctor,  banker,  clergy,  merchant, 
business  man,  and  labourer,  our  democracy  will  not  be  stable 
till  each  in  his  own  house  admits  the  need,  and  faces  the  dread- 
fully difficult  task  of  drastic  professional  reform.  Here  I  make 
but  this  note:  When  a  good  man — more,  a  great  and  patriotic 
American — admits  that  his  native  city's  government  is  so 
rotten  that  under  it  the  property  of  its  citizens  is  being  mis- 
appropriated, but  that,  obeying  the  custom  of  his  profession, 
he  and  the  leaders  of  the  New  York  Bar  have  allowed  them- 
selves to  be  retained  by  those  men  who  they  believe  are  robbing 
the  city,  and  so  by  their  own  professional  action  have  made  it 
impossible  for  them  to  take  any  part  in  publishing  this  wrong- 
doing, or  opposing  the  wrong-doers,  then,  I  say,  it  is  high  time 
that  the  leaders  of  the  great  legal  profession  put  their  own  pro- 
fessional house  in  order. 

I  am  far  from  wishing  to  single  out  Mr.  Choate  for  criticism. 
No  man  in  his  profession  was,  so  far  as  I  know,  so  outspoken  in 
his  condemnation  of  predatory  wealth,  whether  in  individuals 
or  corporate  hands.     I  tell  the  story  to  illustrate  how  even  the 


322  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

best  men  in  the  law  may,  by  acceptance  of  its  unreformed 
usages,  bar  themselves  from  that  very  service  of  the  public  they 
are  particularly  qualified  to  render  it. 

At  a  public  banquet  given  to  Doctor  Parkhurst,  in  Decem- 
ber, 1894,  Mr.  Choate  said  "he  knew  of  his  own  knowledge  that 
there  were  in  this  city  and  state  great  institutions  and  corpora- 
tions that  paid  immense  sums  for  protection  to  the  legislature." 
•  I  was  riding  in  Central  Park  one  day  with  William  C.  Whit- 
ney, when  he  put  the  view  that  he  and  some  very  powerful  rich 
men  then  held  as  to  what  great  lawyers  were  for,  with  as  much 
brevity  as  wit. 

I  had  been  of  some  little  service  to  Mr.  Whitney  in  securing 
a  very  capable  lady  to  act  as  governess  to  his  daughter.  Mr. 
Whitney  was  quite  devoted  to  his  children,  and  he  let  me  see 
that  he  appreciated  what  I  had  done.  I  rode  constantly  in  the 
Park;  so  did  he,  and  when  we  met  there  we  often  rode  for  a  time 
together.  The  next  Democratic  nomination  for  President  was 
then  on  the  knees  of  the  gods.  Many  thought  it  was  Mr. 
Whitney's,  if  he  wanted  it. 

W.  S.  R. — "Mr.  Whitney,  I  suppose  you  will  be  our  next 
President." 

W.  C.  W. — "Oh,  no.  I  am  done  with  politics.  I  must  make 
some  money.  It  is  time  I  did.  Mrs.  Whitney  has  money;  I 
have  none.     I  am  going  into  New  York  Street  Railroads." 

W.  S.  R. — "Well,  they  are  in  such  a  tangle  you  will  need  a  lot 
of  legal  work.     Whom  will  you  engage?" 

W.  C.  W. — "Well,  I  have  engaged  Carter.  He  is  of  course 
good  and  able,  but  I  am  going  to  engage  Root." 

W.  S.  R. — "Why  are  you  changing?" 

W.  C.  W. — "Well,  Carter  tells  me  what  I  cannot  do,  and 
(laughing)  Root  what  I  can." 

Years  after,  one  night  when  I  was  staying  with  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  I  said  to  him,  "Why  in  the  day  of  your  power  did 
you  not  put  your  strength  behind  Elihu  Root  rather  than 
Taft?"  He  looked  at  me  and  said,  "You  know.  Root 
would  make  a  fine  President  of  the  United  States,  but  no  man 
with  his  Corporation  record  could  be  elected." 

The  time  is  coming  when  the  social  conscience  will  expect 
good  men  everywhere  to  regard  their  profession  as  quite  as 
much  a  means  to  serve  the  public  as  to  enrich  themselves.  That 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  323 

time  is  not  yet.  Nothing  I  had  heard  among  labour  people 
depressed  me  as  did  what  Mr.  Choate  said  to  me  that  night 
when  we  were  walking  home. 

I  prefaced  this  chapter  by  saying  that  in  it  I  would  tell  of 
things  attempted  outside  my  parish,  but  attempting  to  follow 
this  plan  I  am  at  a  loss  what  to  take  and  what  to  leave. 

A  mission  I  took  in  1892  deserves  some  mention.  I  went  to 
Pittsburgh  for  a  fortnight,  and  as  it  happened,  it  was  just  before 
the  Homestead  strike. 

I  cannot  remember  the  name  of  the  church  where  I  preached; 
but  interesting  services  I  had  in  a  large  theatre  for  half  an  hour 
at  mid-day.  The  theatre  was  packed  with  business  men,  and 
some  wage  earners. 

I  walked  all  over  Pittsburgh,  as  was  my  custom  when  I  took 
a  mission,  trying  to  size  up  the  place  and  its  people,  for  I  still 
looked  for  my  sermons  on  the  street,  and  found  the  habit  pro- 
fitable. I  had  heard  no  warnings  of  coming  disturbance,  so 
was  surprised  and  angered  when  I  was  halted  by  a  man  out  of 
uniform,  as  I  crossed  one  of  the  city  bridges,  on  a  wide  public 
thoroughfare,  and  then  and  there  was  pawed  all  over  by  him 
to  see  if  I  carried  a  pistol.  My  protest  availed  me  not.  I  was 
told  he  was  a  private  detective  in  the  employ  of  Mr.  Carnegie. 
Why  people  in  Pittsburgh  should  be  expected  to  submit  to  such 
a  condition  of  things  I  could  not  understand,  nor  could  my 
friends  or  my  host  give  me  any  satisfactory  explanation.  In 
New  York  we  had  lain  down  to  men  who  did  things;  that  I 
knew.  But  we  had  not  yet  gone  so  far  as  to  submit  our  per- 
sons to  the  searching  of  their  private  detectives. 

A  day  or  two  after  this,  when  my  "constitutional"  had  taken 
me  well  outside  the  city,  I  had  another  startling  experience.  It 
was  late  on  a  dreary  afternoon;  rain  was  beginning.  The  road 
was  narrow  and  muddy,  a  track  rather  than  a  road;  it  ran  be- 
tween hills  small  and  steep.  Down  their  slopes  tumbled 
irregular  lines  of  cottages,  all  built  to  pattern,  and  mean  and 
cheap  the  pattern  was.  The  doors  of  these  miserable  dwellings 
stood  wide  open,  and  the  people  that  had  been  in  them  were 
now  huddled  by  the  roadside.  There  they  sat  in  whole  fami- 
lies, men,  women,  and  children,  several  hundreds  in  this  one 
place.  Their  poor  little  belongings,  all  they  had,  from  beds  to 
crockery,  were  piled  in  disarray  on  the  ground. 


324  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

I  can  still  see  the  pinched,  despairing  faces  of  the  women, 
the  sullen  anger  in  the  faces  of  the  men,  as  they  sat  homeless, 
night  coming  on,  in  the  mud.  The  Steel  Company  owned 
everything  in  sight.  The  mills,  the  houses  they  lived  in,  the 
stores  they  were  forced  to  trade  in,  and  not  one  corner  could 
they  find  where  mother  and  child  could  shelter  for  the  night. 

The  faces  of  these  dispossessed  people  were  stranger  faces, 
and  their  language  I  could  not  even  name.  I  tried  to  speak 
with  them,  but  we  seemed  to  have  no  word  in  common,  nor 
could  I  find  an  interpreter.  Job's  tremendous  protest,  hurled 
against  the  nature  of  things,  came  back  to  me.  "Neither  is 
there  any  daysman  that  might  lay  his  hand  on  both  of  us." 
(Job  ix,  33.) 

It  was  an  amazing  spectacle.  It  was  not  Christian,  and  it 
did  not  look  even  American  to  me.  Next  day  in  the  church  and 
the  theatre  I  said  so,  and  gave  my  reasons  for  saying  so. 

While  in  Pittsburgh  I  was  the  guest  of  Henry  Kirk  Porter, 
then  in  control  of  the  Kirk  Porter  Co.  works.  Mr.  Porter 
was  an  honest,  outspoken  Christian  man,  respected  and  be- 
loved in  the  city.  Before  I  left  he  gave  me  a  dinner,  and  asked 
a  dozen  or  more  of  Pittsburgh's  leading  citizens  to  meet  me. 
When  dinner  was  over,  Mr.  Porter  said  nice  things  about  my 
mission.  "Doctor  Rainsford,  you  have  used  strong  language 
in  describing  the  social  condition  of  this  town.  You  have 
denounced  things  you  have  seen  here.  I  believe  what  you  have 
said  to  us,  and  of  us,  has  been  true  and  just.  I  am  going  to 
,  add  to  what  you  said  a  statement  of  my  own,  and  if  I  am  wrong, 
you,  my  friends  and  neighbours  who  have  come  to  my  table  to- 
night, are  the  men  who  can  and  should  correct  me.  I  am  going 
to  tell  Doctor  Rainsford  we  thank  him  for  coming,  and  for 
preaching  to  us  the  truth  of  God,  and  for  his  demand  that 
unitedly  we  work  for  social  reform.  I  say  we  need  reform,  for 
within  a  radius  of  twenty  miles  of  the  table  at  which  we  are 
sitting,  no  working  man  can  obtain  justice  in  the  local  courts  as 
against  a  corporation.  If  I  over-state,  gentlemen,  correct 
me." 

No  one  of  the  company  criticized  Mr.  Porter's  statement. 
That  was  nearly  thirty  years  ago.  Since  then  great  changes 
have  taken  place.  The  schools  that  the  children  of  the  steel 
workers  of  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation  attend  seem 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  325 

to  me  as  good  as  any  in  the  land.  But  I  would  like  to  see  the 
labour  unionist  and  the  Master  clasping  honest  hands  in 
Pittsburgh  to-day.  I  think  there  can  be  no  lasting  peace  and 
prosperity  till  they  do.  No  social  welfare  programme  can  take 
the  place  of  a  man's  rights. 

I  went  back  to  my  people  more  than  ever  a  convinced  labour 
unionist.  I  had  seen  for  myself  the  tragic  helplessness  of  un- 
organized labour. 

Those  dumb,  defeated  strangers,  who  were  denied  the  right 
to  make  any  intelligible  bargain  for  the  one  thing  they  had  to 
sell,  showed  me,  more  clearly  than  I  had  yet  seen,  two  things: 

(1)  The  sin  of  the  treatment  some,  at  least,  of  the  strangers 
in  our  land  were  subject  to  at  the  hands  of  corporations. 

(2)  And  the  danger  of  it.  For  if  those  who  should  lead  and 
help  these  people  balked  their  duty,  then  nothing  could  be  more 
certain  than  that  unfitted  and  unscrupulous  leaders  would 
quickly  undertake  the  leadership  which  they  refused  to  take  up. 

My  labour  unionism  got  me  into  hot  water,  and  into  plenty 
of  it. 

In  1895,  the  street-car  strike  convulsed  Brooklyn.  I  said 
then  to  my  people: 

Every  strike  increases  the  army  of  the  discontented.  Every  man  in  whose 
bosom  burns  a  flame  against  what  he  honestly  believes  is  a  cruel  wrong  is  an 
element  of  unrest.  I  say  then  that  every  principle  of  common  sense,  as  well 
as  of  patriotism,  bids  us  stop  strikes.  The  only  way  to  do  this  is  to  be  before- 
hand with  them — prevent  disputes  between  Labour  and  Capital  reaching  that 
point  where,  in  blind  fury,  the  strike  begins. 

Diffused  public  sympathy  with  one  side  or  the  other  cannot  do  this.  Pub- 
lic sympathy  is  not  organized,  and  does  not  act  quickly  or  effectively. 
Compulsory  arbitration  won't  do,  for  once  passion  has  become  inflamed,  it  is 
hard  to  force  either  side  to  accept  the  decree  of  arbitration. 

There  is  another  plan  that,  though  it  may  not  meet  all  the  cases  of  differ- 
ence, could  be  made  to  meet  that  large  number  of  them  in  which  disputes 
arise  between  corporations  engaged  as  public  carriers,  or  in  quasi-public  cor- 
porations and  their  employees.  If  it  succeeded  with  these,  it  might  be  more 
generally  employed.  Why  not  insist  that  all  public  charters  contain  a  clause 
providing  for  a  joint  board,  in  which  men  and  corporations  should  be  equally 
represented,  and  that  all  questions  at  dispute  should  be  discussed  and  settled 
by  that  board?     [I  think  Mrs.  Lowell  was  the  first  to  suggest  this  plan.] 

In  some  trades  this  plan  is  working  to-day,  and  masters  and  men  say  it 
works  well. 


326  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

There  is  no  stability,  no  steady  progress  for  us,  as  long  as  force  is  the  basis 
of  settlement  in  industrial  controversies.  .  .  .  To  cry  out  for  enforce- 
ment of  law  is  right;  every  good  citizen  joins  in  the  cry.  But  what  we  want 
in  this  city  is  a  square  enforcement  of  law  on  all,  not  merely  on  some. 

Law  was  not  made  for  poor  men  only,  but  for  poor  and  rich  alike.  In  this 
strike,  the  companies  seem  in  many  ways  to  have  broken  the  law.  I  protest, 
heart  and  soul,  against  anarchy.  But  it  is  against  all  sorts  of  anarchy  that  I 
protest. 

The  man  who  bribes  the  "boss,"  or  the  legislator,  or  the  policeman  to  give 
him  more  than  the  law  allows  him  is  a  dangerous  anarchist,  the  worst  of  all 
enemies  of  his  country,  the  most  dangerous  conspirator  against  the  public 
weal,  because  he  is  the  hardest  anarchist  to  detect.  Easy  to  detect  and  shoot 
down  the  anarchist  with  the  brickbat  in  his  hand,  but  your  corporation 
anarchist,  who  hires  a  brilliant  lawyer  to  enable  him  to  break  the  law  by 
evading  it,  is  the  most  dangerous  anarchist  we  have  to  deal  with  to-day. 


I  have  quoted  from  my  own  manuscript,  written  in  1895,  at 
length  here,  and  I  confess  that  I  am  a  little  proud,  to-day, 
twenty-seven  years  after  I  wrote  it,  of  what  I  said  then: 

The  Seventh  Regiment  was  called  to  serve  in  Brooklyn.  In 
it  was  then  serving  the  son  of  a  good  friend  of  mine,  a 
member  of  my  vestry.  My  sermon  quoted  above  was  more 
than  he  could  stand,  and  he  came  to  see  me,  quite  angrily 
protesting  that  I  had  no  right  to  use  St.  George's  pulpit  for 
discourses  on  subjects  non-religious,  and  on  which  I  was  ig- 
norant. 

Now  Mr.  W.  L.  B. had  been  very  kind  indeed  to  me;  and 

I  greatly  desired  to  have  him  remain  my  friend.  I  said  what  I 
could  to  mollify  him,  but  of  course  to  give  up  the  principles  that 
I  stood  for  was  out  of  the  question. 

"Let  me  tell  you  a  story,"  I  said.  "A  few  weeks  ago  I  was 
strolling  home  from  upper  New  York,  and  I  noticed  two  brick- 
layers in  front  of  me,  also  on  their  way  home.  As  we  came 
near  Doctor  McArthur's  church  on  West  57th  Street,  one  of  them 
looked  up  at  its  new  face  and  said  to  his  fellow:  'God  damn  the 
Church/  His  companion  made  no  reply,  and  they  passed  on. 
What  are  you  going  to  do  as  a  Christian  man  to  remove  that 
spirit  from  the  hearts  of  thousands?  That  man  honestly, 
fervently  believed  that  the  Church  of  Jesus  Christ  had  gone 
back  on  him  and  his  cause.  You  blame  me  for  speaking  out. 
What  are  you  prepared  to  do?  I  don't  profess  to  be  a  financier. 
You  are.     And  one  of  great  influence.     I  will  ask  you  a  ques- 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  327 

tion :     Did  you  read  Judge  Gaynor's  public  statement  about  the 
financing  of  the  transit  companies  in  Brooklyn  ? " 

He  said,  "I  did." 

"Do  you  think  it  a  correct  statement?" 

"I  think  it  is." 

"Then,  in  God's  name,  how  do  you,  a  Christian  man,  hold 
your  tongue  on  a  subject  on  which  you  are  a  trained  authority, 
and  then  turn  round  and  blame  me  for  doing  imperfectly  a  job 
that  you  know  you,  an  able  financier,  should  do — that  is,  pub- 
licly protest  against  crooked  finance,  which,  if  it  is  persisted 
in,  will  get  all  the  land  into  trouble.  That  bricklayer  who 
damned  the  church  knows  its  true  duty  better  than  you  do.  If 
you  won't  protest,  don't  blame  me  for  protesting  for  you." 

Well,  W.  L.  B.  was  not  convinced,  but  I  had  hope  of  keeping 
him  on  my  vestry,  and  at  my  request  Mr.  Morgan  did  a  rare 
thing  for  him:  he  called  and  urged  him  to  remain.  My  warden 
said  that  "personally  he  disapproved  of  my  stand  and  my  ser- 
mon, but  it  was  wrong  to  attempt  to  muzzle  the  pulpit  of  the 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  and  he  would  not  be  a  party  to 
any  step  by  any  church  official  that  could  be  so  interpreted  by 
the  public."  This  was  my  warden's  invariable  stand — and  it 
was  of  quite  immense  help  to  me — and,  I  might  add,  a  most 
unpopular  stand  among  his  intimates. 

W.  L.  B.'s  son,  who  had  been  on  duty  in  Brooklyn  with  the 
Seventh  during  inclement  weather,  came  down  with  pneumonia. 
That  settled  the  question,  and  W.  L.  B.  resigned  from  St. 
George's  vestry. 

The  truth  was,  then  as  now,  the  classes  hang  together.  It 
was  practically  impossible  to  get  any  man  of  high  financial 
standing  to  come  out  in  the  open  and  denounce  financial 
crookedness  that  he  strongly  disapproved  of  privately.  People 
gird  at  the  pulpit,  cry  to  us  clergy  "  Shoemakers,  stick  to  your 
last!"  But  those  who  criticize  the  clergy  steadily  refuse  to 
take  the  pulpit  and  denounce  wrongdoing  themselves.  The 
capitalists  stand  together,  right  or  wrong.  They  who  de- 
nounce class  action  in  the  wage-earning  class  are  themselves 
ruled  by  the  same  spirit.  The  labour  unionist  who  will  not 
denounce  his  class  even  when  palpably  wrong  is  but  imitating 
the  man  who  employed  him.  The  bonds  of  class  must  even- 
tually weaken,  but  they  are  very  strong  still. 


328  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Kipling,  as  usual,  drives  straight  to  the  point: 

Now  this  is  the  Law  of  the  Jungle — as  old  and  as  true  as  the  sky; 

And  the  Wolf  that  shall  keep  it  may  prosper,  but  the  Wolf  that  shall  break 

it  must  die; 
As  the  creeper  that  girdles  the  tree-trunk,  the  Law  runneth  forward  and 

back — 
For  the  strength  of  the  Pack  is  the  Wolf,  and  the  strength  of  the  Wolf  is  the 

Pack. 

Yes,  that  is  the  Law  of  the  Jungle.  It  is  not  the  Law  of  the 
City  of  God,  and  man's  face  is  not  set  toward  the  Jungle, 
thank  God. 

In  those  days,  as  I  tried  to  look  dispassionately  at  the  work- 
ing of  this  class  feeling — -jungle  law  in  both  classes — a  differ- 
ence in  its  results,  and  on  those  entertaining  it,  seemed  evident. 
Class  feeling  among  the  rich  or  would-be  rich,  or  that  part  of 
the  intellectual  class  who  moved  with  them,  was  a  peculiarly 
narrowing  and  limiting  spirit.  These,  as  they  clung  together 
round  their  fortunes,  actually  and  literally  illustrated  the  tre- 
mendous prophecy  of  Jesus  when  he  cried  to  men  of  the  same 
class  in  His  own  day,  "With  how  great  difficulty  can  you 
understand  or  enter  the  Kingdom  of  Brotherhood  and  of  God, 
which  is  coming  on  this  earth?" 

Class  feeling  among  the  poor,  while  it  was  often  narrow- 
minded,  misjudging  others,  and  inflicting  cruel  wrong,  had  yet 
one  saving  quality  in  it  that  was  lacking  in  the  other.  Its 
aim  was  to  uplift  the  weak,  and  its  spirit  was  not  devoid  of  self- 
sacrifice.     It  aimed  to  help  the  "under  dog." 

I  did  not  then,  I  do  not  now,  believe  in  enforced  labour  union- 
ism. The  labour  movement  has  made  great  advances  since 
those  days — some  in  a  totally  wrong  direction.  There  was  no 
limitation  of  output  then,  and  little  of  the  trickery,  bribery, 
violence,  and  crime  that  have  played  so  large  a  part  in  the 
modern  labour  movement.  Capitalism  sought  to  force  its 
will  on  the  nation:  it  failed.  Labour  unionism  faithfully  fol- 
lowed its  example,  as  was  natural  for  it  to  do.  It,  too,  must 
surely  fail. 

Of  the  problem  of  to-day,  others  younger  than  I  can  better 
speak.     So  I  am  not  dealing  with  a  present  situation;  I  am 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  329 

describing  a  past  situation.  I  am  not  writing  as  a  theorizer  on 
what  happened  in  the  'gofs.  I  am  writing  from  personal  ex- 
perience. I  had  the  honour  of  knowing  some  of  the  men  most 
prominent  in  the  Labour  Party.  It  was  from  their  lips  that  I 
learned  their  aims,  and  the  means  they  would  employ  to  ac- 
complish them,  and  without  hesitation  I  declare  that  all  they 
asked  was  a  square  deal  and  justice.  And  they  got  neither. 
What  they  did  get  they  had  to  fight  for,  bitterly  and  long. 

Powderly,  the  much  vilified  leader  of  the  Knights  of  Labour, 
was  as  brave  and  unselfish  a  worker  for  the  public  good  as  I 
ever  met.  More  than  once,  in  those  bitterly  hard  days,  he 
turned  a  large  slice  of  his  salary  back  into  the  treasury  of  the 
organization  he  led. 

John  Mitchell  was  one  of  the  ablest  men  I  ever  knew.  He 
never  worked  for  his  own  advancement.  Roosevelt  had  a 
great  opinion  of  both  his  character  and  capacity.  Lawrence 
Abbott  has  a  delicious  story  of  the  President's  own  telling. 
When  disputes  grew  hot  at  the  meeting  of  owners  and  labour 
unionists  called  by  the  President  to  settle  the  anthracite  coal 
strike,  said  the  President,  "there  was  only  one  man  in  the  room 
who  kept  his  temper,  and  it  was  not  I;  it  was  John  Mitchell." 

The  President  later  told  me  that  but  for  one  unfortunate 
contretemps  John  Mitchell  would  have  been  in  his  cabinet  of 
1904. 

If  things  looked  dark  in  New  York,  there  was  another  city 
whose  white,  classic  loveliness  stood,  for  one  summer,  as  a 
world  wonder  to  those  who  saw.  I  went  for  a  three  weeks'  visit 
to  the  World's  Fair,  and  while  there  was  doubly  fortunate  in 
staying  at  the  house  of  one  of  its  creators,  Mr.  Burnham.  I 
first  saw  that  city  of  the  ideal  as  the  sun  sank  behind  it,  on  a 
glorious  evening  in  early  summer,  and  the  utter  beauty  of  it 
entered  my  soul.  By  no  people  before  or  since  had  anything 
like  it  been  attempted.  The  unity  of  it  amazed  me.  The  utter 
idealism  of  it!  Arid  this  the  product  of  a  material  age,  of  a  na- 
tion of  dollar  worshippers  ?     Nonsense ! 

That  wonderful  white  city  stood  there  for  six  months.  The 
Old  World,  having  made  up  its  mind  what  it  must  be,  since  it 
knew  what  Americans  were,  never  came  near  it,  never  knew 
anything  about  it.  But  to  those  who  came  and  could  see  and 
understand,  that  white  loveliness  told  an  unforgettable  story. 


33o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

The  story  of  the  soul  of  a  great  and  efficient  people,  at  root  as 
intensely  idealistic  as  they  were  efficient. 

When  Chicago  feted  the  men  that  made  the  Fair  on  her  great 
anniversary  night,  I  was  among  the  fortunate  to  be  invited  to  a 
seat  at  her  table.  I  happened  to  sit  next  poor  Stanford  White. 
There  on  the  Peristyle,  round  a  beautiful  table,  spread  under 
the  stars,  were  gathered  the  men  who  had  planned,  financed, 
and  built  what  we  looked  on.  I  heard  each  man  of  them  speak 
of  his  fellows'  work,  not  of  his  own,  praising  it  in  fine  self-for- 
getfulness. 

I  never  spent  three  more  profitable  weeks  than  those  at  the 
Chicago  Fair.  I  lived  near  the  Fair  gate.  I  studied  and 
wondered.  The  people  drew  me,  amazed  me,  inspired  and 
taught  me.  Plain  America  in  a  classic  setting!  Was  there 
ever  anything  so  incongruous?  But  somehow  the  whole  thing 
succeeded  marvellously.  The  buildings  were  beautiful,  but  the 
millions  that  thronged  them  were  the  real  exhibit  America  was 
making  to  herself  and  to  the  world. 

Order  reigned  everywhere.  But  to  say  so  is  not  enough. 
Something  more  than  order  was  there:  the  evidence  of  a  high 
sort  of  national  self-respect;  no  boisterousness,  no  unseemly 
merriment.  It  seemed  as  though  the  beauty  of  the  place 
brought  gentleness,  happiness,  and  self-respect  to  its  visitors. 
There  was  no  drunkenness.  (I  saw  one  drunken  man  in 
three  weeks.)  I  never  saw  a  quarrel  nor  heard  an  oath,  and 
from  morning  till  late  at  night  I  mingled  in  the  throng. 

When  dinner  was  over,  that  unforgettable  night  in  Chicago, 
one  of  the  creators  of  that  scene  said  to  me,  "Look  over  that 
Court  of  Honour.  There  is  scant  standing  room  in  it.  There 
are  one  million  people  in  it.  To-night  the  dense  masses  of 
them  are  crowded  to  the  very  edge  of  the  long  water  fronts;  and 
within  a  few  feet  of  where  they  stand  the  water  is  nine  feet 
deep.  Any  lack  of  self-control,  any  undue  excitement,  and 
hundreds  would  drown."  Said  I, "Why  do  you  risk  it ? "  (There 
were  no  police  cordons  that  night.  The  throng  was  too  vast. 
I  myself  watched  an  ambulance,  as  we  were  at  dinner  on  the 
Peristyle,  making  its  way  from  the  one  end  of  the  Court  of 
Honour  to  the  other;  someone  was  ill,  and  that  brief  journey 
of  four  hundred  yards  took  three  quarters  of  an  hour.)  He 
answered,   "You  can   trust  an   American   crowd."     He  was 


NEW  YORK,  1890-1906  331 

right.  But  I  would  add  to-day,  yes,  an  American  crowd,  but 
not  a  hyphenated  American  crowd.  There  was  no  sign  of  the 
hyphen  at  Chicago.  All  there  were  proud  of  their  land,  and 
proud  of  the  Fair,  for  had  not  the  land  produced  it? 

I  came  back  to  my  work  more  than  ever  convinced  of  the 
innate  idealism  of  Americans. 


CHAPTER  XXII 

Anti-ism 

I  never  found  myself  in  hearty  sympathy  with  the  popular 
form  in  which  the  good  intentions  of  our  would-be  reformers 
generally  were  expressed.  I  must  coin  a  phrase  to  express  it: 
"anti-ism."  I  found  I  could  not  work  with  professional  re- 
formers. They  are  unbalanced,  unfair,  impracticable- — usually 
they  grow  more  unbalanced  as  they  age.  I  never  did  believe 
much  in  the  anti  principle — anti-saloon,  anti-woman's  suffrage, 
anti-vice,  anti-Sunday  opening  of  museums,  anti-vivisection. 
What  a  strange  list  they  make  as  I  put  down  a  few  of  them ! 
All  of  them  seemed  to  imply  the  surrender  of  a  personal  political 
duty  into  the  hands  of  good  people  who,  obsessed  by  too  con- 
stant a  study  of  certain  evil  tendencies  in  society,  were  the  last 
persons  that  should  have  been  trusted  to  formulate  or  enforce 
laws  directed  against  those  tendencies. 

There  is  another  serious  drawback  to  your  "anti"  reformer. 
He  claims  power  over  his  fellow-citizens;  power  deputed  to 
him  by  a  group,  rather  than  by  the  whole  community.  Such 
power  is  dangerous  for  any  man,  and  for  his  sort  of  man  doubly 
dangerous.  Dangerous  to  the  public  and  hurtful  to  himself. 
The  more  power  he  has  the  more  he  craves.  That  craving 
becomes  his  obsession;  and  he  is  on  the  highroad  to  be  as  un- 
scrupulous in  his  methods  as  the  most  unscrupulous  politician 
he  denounces.  Here  I  am  not  theorizing.  I  am  but  stating 
what  I  have  seen. 

I  could  not,  when  I  was  young,  see  my  way  to  approve  the 
course  reform  generally  took  in  New  York  any  more  than  I  can 
now,  when  I  have  unfortunately  reached  that  age  at  which  (if 
the  old  Jewish  sage  is  to  be  believed)  life  is  nothing  but  "labour 
and  sorrow,"  though  my  experience  of  life  makes  me  differ 
from  him.  I  am  so  unrepentant,  indeed,  that  I  do  not  approve 
the  last  and  cleverest  "coup"  of  anti-ism — I  mean  the  forcing  of 

332 


ANTI-ISM  333 

prohibition  on  the  nation  by  way  of  an  amendment  to  its  Con- 
stitution, rather  than  by  an  open  campaign  and  deciding  vote. 

The  last  piece  of  successful  anti-ism,  prohibition,  was  "put 
over"  by  a  clever  trick,  and  a  powerful  and  most  unscrupulous 
"lobby."  We  may  be  ready  for  it  or  we  may  not,  but  the 
way  of  its  doing  affords  a  bad  precedent.  The  big  things  in  our 
lives,  the  lovely  things,  the  things  that  lift  us  above  our  lower 
selves,  are  not  law-born,  but  are  free  loyalties.  Not  a  multi- 
tude of  obediences  that  are  forced,  but  voluntary  compacts 
that  are  free. 

This  is  all  old-fashioned  stuff,  but  it  is  everlastingly  true, 
in  spite  of  the  Eighteenth  Amendment  to  the  Constitution.  We 
were  growing  soberer — we  really  were!  I  fear  we  may,  or  our 
children  may,  regret  bitterly  this  forcing  of  sobriety  on  us  by 
the  zealots  of  prohibition. 

I  do  not  admire  Disraeli.  I  think  his  influence  on  England's 
life  was  bad.  He  fostered  and  he  flattered  what  was  cheapest 
and  worst  in  the  English  character.  He  truckled  to  the  liquor 
vote  in  England,  and  did  much  to  fasten  its  grip  on  the  political 
and  social  life  of  the  time.  But  admitting  all  this,  he  struck  a 
high  and  true  note  when,  on  the  floor  of  the  House  of  Commons, 
he  said,  "I  would  rather  see  England  free  than  sober."  That 
is  true  Democracy! 

Lord  Acton,  probably  the  greatest  historian  of  his  day, 
says:  "In  ancient  times  the  state  absorbed  authorities  not  its 
own.  In  the  Middle  Ages  it  possessed  too  little  authority,  and 
suffered  others  to  intrude.  Modern  states  fall  habitually  into 
both  excesses.  The  most  certain  test  by  which  we  judge 
whether  a  country  is  really  free  is  the  amount  of  security  en- 
joyed by  minorities."1 

There  he  uttered  an  unanswerable  truth,  one  that  our  hurry- 
ing, half-educated  legislators  and  anti-reformers  generally 
would  do  well  to  remember. 

On  my  return  from  Africa  in  1913,  I  was  asked  by  my  old 
"friend"  the  Sun,  to  write  an  editorial  letter  (signed),  giving 
my  opinion  of  the  value  of  vice  commission  work.  It  seems 
worth  reprinting  here. 

For  twenty-five  years  I  lived  on  the  East  Side  of  New  York.     I  knew  the 
people  there,  poor  and  well-to-do.      I  knew  the  officials.      I  knew  well  the 
1  "Essays  on  Liberty,"  page  4. 


334  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

agents  of  several  such  societies,  and  I  had  excellent  opportunities  for  estimat- 
ing the  value  to  the  public  of  what  they  accomplished. 

I  absolutely  agree  with  the  position  taken  by  the  Sun.  We  do  not  want 
another  vigilance  committee  on  morals. 

Without  going  as  far  as  the  Sun  in  its  editorial  article  of  May  8th,  and  con- 
demning the  agents  of  such  private  societies  as  "  notoriously  corrupt,  unde- 
pendable  and  dishonest,"  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say  that  their  inefficiency,  big- 
otry, partiality,  and  lack  of  intelligence;  their  incapacity  to  see  and  understand 
what  should  be  and  could  be  for  the  good  of  a  great  city's  life,  led  them  often 
into  mistakes  of  judgment  and  intrigues  so  grave  as  to  be  almost  if  not 
actually  criminal. 

When  this  was  the  case,  the  social  power  behind  them  shielded  them  from 
exposure  and  often  from  even  public  criticism. 

Such  organizations  have  their  birth  in  hours  of  excitement  and  popular 
passion.  They  never  lose  their  birthmarks.  Their  direction  passes  into 
the  hands  of  unbalanced  reformers,  good  in  their  intentions,  no  doubt, 
but  above  all  things  bent  on  forcing  forward  their  own  specially  desired  re- 
forms by  any  means  that  seem  to  them  allowable.  Unbalanced  men  they 
were,  and  are,  and  must  be.  They  know  little  of  the  history  of  sociology. 
They  have  seldom  given  serious  study  to  the  immensely  difficult  problem  for 
the  solving  of  which  they  are  sure  they  carry  a  "  cure-all "  in  their  pocket. 

At  best  they  are  a  species  of  vigilance  committee  in  morals.  Now  when 
society  is  crude  and  has  had  no  time  to  organize  itself,  vigilance  committees 
may  be  necessary.  I  have  lived  in  rude  communities  where  temporarily  they 
did  good  work.  But  surely  in  a  great  city  growing  fast  toward  self-con- 
sciousness they  are  quite  out  of  place. 

Welfare  commissions  and  such  like  are  but  an  application  of  a  superficial 
plaster  to  a  deep  and  running  sore.  They  do  not  reach  its  infected  and  in- 
fecting source.  Their  tendency,  as  the  old  Book  has  it,  is  "  to  heal  the  wound 
of  the  daughter  of  my  people  slightly." 

They  afford  the  lazy  man  or  the  man  who  wants  to  avoid  doing  his  duty  to 
his  city  or  country  an  excuse  for  shirking. 

Yes,  I  agree  with  the  Sun.  In  the  name  of  all  social  common  sense  let  us 
stop  creating  commissions,  stop  endowing  groups  of  excited  and  irresponsible 
people  with  power  they  have  not  the  wit  or  the  training  to  use  aright.  Such 
powers  must  be  finally  entrusted  only  to  appointed  and  responsible  officials. 
Let  us  aim  at  orderly  government  for  our  great  city  and  do  away  with  the 
vigilance  committee.  Even  the  best  vigilance  committees  sometimes  hanged 
the  wrong  man. 

Well,  having  said  a  small  part  of  what  I  would  like  to  say  on 
anti-ism  generally,  and  having  once  more  repeated  a  chief 
article  of  my  creed,  that  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  never  did 
come  and  never  can  come  by  way  of  law,  but  as  Jesus  said  it 
would  come,  by  way  of  "leaven,"  I  proceed  with  the  story  of 
my  fallings  out  with  the  antis  of  my  time;  and  the  first  of  them 
was  a  very  mild  and  rather  amusing  affair. 


ANTI-ISM  335 

Soon  after  my  coming  to  St.  George's,  I  was  invited  to  make 
the  chief  address  at  the  annual  meeting  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A. 
Its  headquarters  then  were  in  the  old  building  on  23rd  Street, 
near  Fourth  Avenue.  A  few  days  before  this  meeting,  I  had 
dined  with  one  of  the  important  officers  of  the  "Y"  at  his  house 
on  Madison  Avenue.  I  had  a  pleasant  dinner,  an  after-dinner 
cigar,  and  a  billiard  table  was  in  plain  sight. 

I  determined  that  when  my  chance  came  to  speak,  I  would 
urge  on  the  "Y"  the  need  of  more  liberal  views  in  regard  to 
the  needs  of  the  city's  youth.  Urge  those  controlling  it  to  do 
pretty  much  what  I  was  then  attempting,  viz. :  give  the  boys  a 
chance  for  the  recreation  they  so  much  needed.  Give  them 
gymnasium  room,  and  let  them  smoke  somewhere,  if  they 
wanted  to. 

In  those  days  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  was  far  too  "goody-goody." 
It  has  greatly  changed  for  the  better  since.  But  of  course  it 
never  will  do  what  it  might  do  for  the  youth  of  the  land  till 
it  abandons  the  archaic  evangelical  creed  test  that  it  still  en- 
forces on  its  officials. 

Here  let  me  tell  of  a  letter  that  fine  servant  of  his  fellow-men 
and  supporter  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  George  Perkins,  wrote  to  me 
not  long  before  his  death.  I  had  urged  him  to  use  his  great 
influence  in  the  "Y"  to  shake  it  free  of  the  creed.  Both  he 
and  Mr.  Cleveland  Dodge  wrote  to  me  saying  that  they  fully 
agreed  with  me  in  this,  but  that  they  feared  that  in  the  face  of 
war  conditions  such  a  reform  would  entail  a  falling  off  of  fi- 
nancial support.  I  differed  totally.  I  thought  then  and  think 
still,  that  if  the  "Y"  had  gone  to  the  country,  the  whole  country , 
in  that  hour  of  national  enthusiasm,  with  the  plea  that,  since 
the  creed-divided  churches  could  not  unite  to  do  the  vast 
work  our  two  million  boys  across  the  sea  called  for,  so  it, 
the  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  would  claim  the  support  of  all  fathers  and 
mothers  in  the  land,  and  go  after  the  boys  in  the  name  of  God 
and  Country;  if  this  ground  had  been  taken  and  this  appeal 
made,  the  national  response  would  have  amazed  the  whole 
world — and  what  a  deliverance  it  would  have  given  the  "  Y". 

Well,  to  return  to  George  Perkins's  letter.  It  was  written 
from  France,  and  it  told  briefly  of  some  of  his  difficulties  in 
getting  the  right  sort  of  man  to  take  charge  of  advanced  sta- 
tions of  the   "Y."       "I  began  life,"  said   George   Perkins, 


336  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

"sorting  lemons,  and  here  I  am  about  ending  it  doing  the  same 
thing — trying  to  sort  lemons  out  of  the  *  Y.' "  Alas,  he  did  not 
always  succeed. 

Well,  to  get  back  to  23rd  Street  and  the  early  '8o's.  I  ended 
my  talk  with  a  plea  for  larger  and  better  gymnasiums,  for  bil- 
liard tables,  and  a  roomy  and  well-ventilated  smoking  room  in 
every  Y.  M.  C.  A.  building  in  New  York. 

The  feelings  of  the  audience  before  me  were  evidently  mixed, 
but  in  the  back  of  the  big  hall  applause  was  tumultuous.  On 
the  platform  behind  me  were  audible  sighs  of  disagreement, 
and  among  the  opposition  sat  my  host  of  a  few  nights  before. 
Here  was  my  chance.  So  laughingly  I  turned  to  him  and  said, 
"Well,  I  am  sure  that  I  can  count  on  powerful  support  in  ad- 
vocating the  radical  measures  from  Mr. ,  for  last  night  I 

dined  with  him  a/id  he  gave  me  an  excellent*  cigar,  and  also 
provided  a  good  billiard  table." 

Billiard  tables  and  smoking  rooms  and  splendid  gymnasi- 
ums came — not  immediately,  but  they  came !  And  I  am  proud 
to  have  been  the  first  openly  to  foretell  them,  at  a  great  an- 
niversary of  the  association.  But  that  was  the  first  and  last 
time  I  was  asked  to  address  the  New  York  Y.  M.  C.  A. 

Its  creed  was  an  impossibly  narrow  evangelical  statement 
then,  and  it  has  the  same  creed  to-day.  Its  religious  directors 
were  good  men.  They  were  of  Moody's  school.  The  Bible 
class  was  taught  by  someone  trained  in  the  organization  itself, 
and  the  usual  handling  of  the  great  Book  generally  ignored 
sound  modern  scholarship,  for  it  knew  nothing  about  it.  Its 
young  leaders  were  men  like  Mr.  Mott — able,  honest,  and 
sincerely  pious  and  first-class  organizers,  but  not  averse  to  dog- 
matizing on  matters  regarding  which  they  were  ignorant.  They 
followed  good  D wight  Moody  in  opposing  evolution.  They 
barred  all  who  accepted  the  evolutionary  hypothesis  from  their 
platforms.  Even  Henry  Drummond,  who,  I  think,  was  one 
of  the  greatest  preachers  of  his  time,  was  no  longer  welcomed 
at  Northfield.  (Moody  finally  admitted  him,  but  the  spirit  of 
Northfield  was  hostile,  so  H.  D.  told  me.)  And  this  policy  of 
religious  obscurantism  has  terribly  limited  and  is  limiting  the 
usefulness  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A. 

My  next  trouble  with  anti-ism  rose  from  an  effort  to  liberal- 
ize the  Sunday  conditions  in  New  York.    These  were  really 


ANTI-ISM  337 

intolerable.     I  quote  from  a  sermon  preached  to  my  own  peo- 
ple: 

Many  well-disposed  people  in  the  city  distrust  Christianity,  and  one  of  the 
chief  reasons  for  their  attitude  is  that  we  go,  not  to,  but  at  them,  in  the 
name  of  Christ.  He  went  as  a  brother,  but  we  go  with  a  policeman's  club. 
Nothing  can  be  more  un-Christian,  nothing  more  fatal.  We  say  to  them, 
"We  will  shut  you  up  to  church-going  by  law.  If  you  won't  go  to  church, 
you  shan't  go  anywhere."  Puritanism  over  again.  It  never  did  work;  it 
never  could  work,  even  under  a  Cromwell.  We  have  practically  said,  "You 
shall  not  play,  you  shall  not  read,  you  shall  not  rest  your  souls  and  bodies  by 
the  sea  or  on  the  green  sod  of  the  open  country."  Some  think  I  am  exag- 
gerating. I  wish  I  were.  Who,  may  I  ask,  opposed,  and  are  still  opposing, 
the  opening  of  the  museums,  kept  up  by  the  taxes  the  people  must  pay? 
The  churches!  Who  opposed  the  opening  libraries?  The  churches!  Who 
opposed  the  running  of  street  cars  and  Sunday  trains — the  only  possible 
means  by  which  the  multitudes  can  reach  the  country  ?  The  churches !  Who 
forbid  Sunday  games  to  the  young?  Insensate  folly!  The  churches!  If 
a  boy,  forbidden  by  law  "to  play  on  the  public  streets,  gets  half  a  dozen 
lads  to  join  him  in  a  surreptitious  game  of  ball  on  some  vacant  lot,  where 
pickets,  placed  all  around  the  neighbourhood,  give  warning  of  the  approach- 
ing policeman — who  sets  the  enginery  of  the  law  in  motion  against  him,  until 
all  his  boyish  wit  is  aroused  to  avoid  that  law  or  to  defy  it?  The  churches! 
That  boy  pockets  his  ball  and  hides  his  bat,  but  takes  a  mental  oath  that 
churches,  Sunday  Schools,  and  all  parsons  are  his  natural  enemies. 

In  New  York  there  are  many  wonderful  and  beautiful  things 
that  the  poorest  may  see  without  cost.  And  outside  New 
York  there  is  a  greater  variety  of  beauty  by  sea  and  lake  and 
woodside  than  in  the  outskirts  of  any  other  city  on  the  globe. 
But  the  churches  wronged  their  Master  in  those  days,  for 
they  closed  the  door  of  knowledge  and  they  veiled  the  face 
of  beauty  from  the  poor  of  the  city  just  as  long  as  they  could. 
They  had  their  chance  with  the  working  people,  and  they 
threw  it  away;  and  now  they  wonder  that  those  people  do  not 
come  to  church. 

It  is  worth  while  recording  these  controversies  now  long 
past  and  dead,  because  we  cannot  fit  ourselves  to  meet  future 
obligations  if  we  do  not  remember  something  of  the  struggles 
and  changes  by  which  we  have  won  to  any  social  betterment 
that  now  is  ours.  And  for  this  reason  I  briefly  tell  of  another 
reform  movement  I  had  a  part  in  suggesting  then,  and  I  be- 
lieve the  future  will  yet  see  some  application  of  it. 

I  was  fiercely  criticized  for  advocating  the  opening  of  saloons 


338  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

for  certain  hours  on  Sunday.  I  stood  alone  in  such  advocacy. 
That  was  many  years  ago,  but  I  have  not  changed  my  opinion. 
I  had  seen,  as  a  boy,  more  of  the  drink  traffic  in  big  cities  than 
most.  I  will  quote  from  a  sermon  in  St.  George's,  preached 
at  this  time: 

Let  me  make  my  position  plain.  I  am  not  approving  the  present  saloon. 
I  wish  every  saloon  in  New  York  could  be  closed  and  kept  closed  seven  days 
in  the  week.  But  it  is  as  certain  as  that  I  stand  here  and  am  preaching  to 
you  this  morning  that  the  present  saloon,  bad  as  it  is,  is  the  only  means  of 
supplying  an  imperative  social  need  in  this  city.  If  you  would  win  people 
from  it,  there  is  only  one  way  to  do  so.  You  must  give  them  something 
better.  Until  you  do  this,  to  close  the  saloon  on  Sunday  is  to  do  all  you  can 
to  fasten  blackmail  and  corruption  on  the  city  of  New  York. 

To  attempt  to  close  the  saloons,  when  thousands  not  only  want  to  use  them 
but  think  they  have  a  right  to  use  them,  is  something  worse  than  a  mistake 
in  policy. 

The  chief  danger  in  the  conduct  of  the  liquor  trade  lies  in  the  fact  that, 
as  it  is  now  conducted,  there  is  more  profit  in  it  than  in  any  other.  It  is  able 
to  pay  the  Brewer,  the  Distiller,  the  Saloon-keeper,  the  Policeman,  and  the 
Politician.    Take  that  profit  out  of  it,  and  you  cut  the  very  sinews  of  its  war. 

The  saloon  of  the  future  should  be  run  to  meet  the  needs  of  the  city.  It 
should  be  a  real  public  house.  I  have  again  and  again  insisted  on  the  dread- 
ful need  there  is  of  a  well-organized  City  Public  House.  The  drinking  house 
has  gained  its  grip  because  the  life  of  its  victims  is  so  dull,  stale,  flat!  so  de- 
void of  all  legitimate  amusement  and  recreation,  that  they  know  no  other 
excitement,  no  other  relaxation  than  the  semi-stupor,  the  grateful  forgetful- 
ness,  of  creeping  inebriation. 

Amusement,  variety,  aroused  interest,  these  are  the  truest  and  deadliest 
foes  of  the  drink  habit.  Help  such  human  instincts,  such  healthy  cravings, 
to  a  legitimate  satisfaction  in  a  Public  House,  and  such  places  are  no  longer 
snares  to  drag  men  downward,  but  kindly  hands  to  help  them  upward. 

The  public  house  the  people  need  is  no  mere  dram  shop,  but  a  cheap,  orderly, 
democratic  social  centre.  It  would  provide  amusement — music  certainly. 
It  needs  no  standing  bar.  Its  food  supply  should  be  cheap,  plentiful,  and 
well  cooked.  The  best  soft  drinks  and  milk,  coffee,  and  tea  should  be  as 
much  its  staple  in  trade  as  beer  and  light  wines.  One  aim  it  should  embody, 
the  providing  of  reasonable  and  orderly  social  intercourse  for  those  masses 
of  the  city's  population  who  are  obliged  by  the  unusually  restricted  circum- 
stances surrounding  their  homes  to  seek  some  space  and  entertainment  away 
from  them. 

Such  was  the  outline  of  my  scheme  in  the  early  'c^o's  of 
a  sensible  attack  on  the  liquor  traffic — of  a  substitute  for 
prohibition.     And  some  day  I  believe  my  dream  will  come  true. 

Charles  Booth's  great  book,  "The  Life  and  Labour  of  the 


ANTI-ISM  339 

People  in  London,"  had  not  then  been  published.  When  later 
I  read  it,  I  found  that  Mr.  Booth,  after  going  very  thoroughly 
into  the  whole  question  of  the  public  house,  came  to  the  con- 
clusion that  as  things  were,  they  were  a  necessity. 

My  appeal  came  to  nothing  then,  but  as  I  look  back,  as  I 
read  this  endorsement  of  my  plan  by  the  greatest  authority  on 
social  reform  on  either  side  of  the  Atlantic,  I  am  glad  I  did 
what  I  did. 

As  if  these  protests  against  popular  anti-ism  did  not  get  me 
enemies  enough,  I  was  to  have  a  further  experience  in  the  gentle 
art  of  making  them,  and  with  it  I  shall  end  the  list.  The  city 
schools  might  be  a  disgrace,  and  the  teachers  in  them  owe 
their  places  to  ward  politicians — too  bad!  But  a  cheque 
to  Mr.  Gerry's  society  would  set  their  short-comings  right. 

The  tens  of  thousands  of  young  women  and  girls  in  the 
growing  department  stores  and  places  of  retail  business  might 
be  eking  out  a  bare  living  on  an  unrighteous  wage.  If  so,  be 
sure  and  support  the  anti-vice  society,  Mr.  Comstock's  society. 

I  find  it  hard,  even  now,  so  long  after,  to  think  on  the  doings 
of  that  famous  "anti"  society  under  the  guidance  of  that 
honest,  coarse-minded,  ignorant,  and  unscrupulous  man, 
with  any  patience.  The  absurdity  of  Anthony  Comstock 
could  not  have  been  possible  in  any  other  city  or  at  any  other 
time.  His  the  final  decision  on  what  was  or  was  not  the  bound 
of  moral  freedom — of  what  might  be  printed,  or  what  might  be 
said! 

The  Society  for  the  Suppression  of  Vice  had  then,  as  it  has 
now,  able  and  good  men  on  its  board  of  trustees,  but  they  did 
not  in  the  '90's,  nor  do  they  to-day,  I  fear,  take  charge  of 
their  agents  and  force  them  to  act  with  decency  and  common 
sense.  Comstock  had  become  a  moral  tyrant.  Mr.  W.  E. 
Dodge,  one  of  the  best  citizens  we  had  in  New  York,  was  very 
influential  on  the  board  of  the  society.  I  sought  out  Mr. 
Dodge,  who  always  was  most  kind  and  considerate  to  me.  The 
reasons  why  I  did  so  I  will  state  as  briefly  as  I  can. 

I  had  come  to  believe  in  birth  control.  How  any  one  con- 
versant with  conditions  as  they  were  could  fail  to  believe  in  it 
I  didn't  know.  The  subject  is  openly  discussed  now.  Then, 
few  ventured  even  to  mention  it.  Doctors  were  dumb  where 
the  poor  were  concerned — where  the  need  of  advice  was  great- 


34o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

est — but  a  large  fee  sometimes  won  cautiously  given  advice. 
The  Roman  Catholic  Church  was  openly  hostile,  and  all  Prot- 
estant churches  discreetly  silent.  And  so  steadily  the  pro- 
duction of  unwanted  souls  went  on  in  New  York.  The  worse 
the  conditions  surrounding  East  Side  infancy  the  greater  was 
the  number  of  the  unwelcome  and  unfit. 

I  had  been  in  close  touch  with  the  poor  since  I  was  a  boy, 
and  the  cowardly,  wicked  horror  of  English  and  American  law, 
which  still  sends  to  prison  for  a  long  term  any  one  who  tells 
an  unfortunate  woman  how  she  can  avoid  having  a  child  till 
she  wants  and  is  ready  to  have  one,  grew  on  me. 

But  the  chief  blame  was  not  with  the  Anti-Vice  Society.  An- 
thony Comstock  and  those  supporting  him  were  but  enforcing  the 
law  as  it  stood.  The  blame  lay  with  the  American  public  itself; 
lay  in  that  spirit  of  cowardly  moral  slovenliness  which  we  who 
are  proud  of  our  Anglo-Saxon  ancestry  have  inherited  from  it. 
A  moral  hypocrisy  which  sometimes  will  not  admit  the  ex- 
istence of  a  moral  obligation;  that,  instead  of  facing  the  fact, 
puts  its  head,  ostrich-like,  in  a  bush. 

When  the  law  was  made,  it  was  a  sound  workable  law,  for 
it  then  expressed  the  conviction  of  the  best  men  of  that  time. 
In  those  days  men  thought  that  the  conception  of  child  life  was 
a  divine  prerogative;  that  the  begetting  of  good  children  lay 
in  the  mystery  of  the  Omnipotent  and  irresponsible  Divine 
Will,  and  that  any  merely  human  attempt  at  interference  with 
His  decree  was  impious. 

To  us  who  know  a  little  more  of  human  power  and  unavoid- 
able responsibilities,  the  law  as  it  stands  is  a  hideous,  savage, 
immoral  law.  A  farmer  would  be  a  fool  if  he  made  application 
of  it  to  his  cows.  It  is  a  disgrace  to  the  intelligence  and  hon- 
esty of  Democracy,  and  yet,  neither  our  lawyers,  whose  special 
charge  it  is  to  advise  us  as  to  needful  legal  reform,  nor  doctors, 
who  know  the  admittedly  terrible  results  that  attend  unfit  and 
unwilling  child  bearing;  nor  clergy,  whose  professed  duty  it  is  to 
interpret  life's  duties  in  the  light  that  shines  from  a  God  of 
Truth,  ever  revealing  to  us  newer  and  more  beautiful  things — 
none  of  them,  I  say,  though  most  of  them  are  steadily  breaking  in 
their  own  family  life  the  law,  have  yet  dared  to  come  out  into  the 
open  and  denounce  it  for  what  it  is:  an  evil-working  relic  of 
barbarism,  an  outrage  on  womanhood,  a  betrayal  of  the  child. 


ANTI-ISM  341 

Such  conclusions  I  had  come  to,  but  what  was  my  duty? 
Something  I  must  do.  I  must  help  my  poor.  Among  the 
well-to-do,  where  the  need  of  knowledge  was  not  so  great, 
knowledge  was  spreading,  and  multitudes  were  practising  what 
the  poorest  were  prevented  from  learning.   • 

Public  opinion  was  not  prepared  to  compel  a  change  in  the 
law.  I  could  and  did  protest  against  the  law  from  my  pulpit. 
So  much  was  my  right  and  my  duty.  What  I  did  was  this: 
One  day  a  woman  of  evident  education  and  refinement  came  to 
see  me.  She  had  happened  into  the  church  and  had  heard  my 
protest  against  the  enforcement  of  a  bad  and  unjust  law.  She 
impressed  me  as  a  trustworthy  woman;  not  a  crank,  one  whose 
own  experience  of  life  had  disposed  her  to  spend  herself  in 
quietly  spreading,  among  those  who  needed  it  most,  a  knowl- 
edge of  the  methods  of  birth  control.  She  had  first-rate  creden- 
tials as  to  character.  She  made  no  public  addresses,  but  did 
her  work  quietly,  as  she  lived  among  the  poor. 

This  woman  I  determined  to  help.  She  asked  for  only  a 
living  wage,  and  I  gave  her  money  and  bade  her  godspeed. 
She  well  understood  the  risks  she  ran,  and  quietly  assumed 
them  in  order  to  do  the  work  that  she  felt  she  was  called  to  do. 
She  was  to  come  to  me  for  money  and  advice.  More  I  could 
not  do  for  her.  This  was  the  arrangement  between  us,  and  the 
brave  soul  kept  it. 

After  some  months  she  came  to  me  and  said  that  Comstock's 
detectives  were  dogging  her,  and  she  thought  she  had  better, 
for  a  time  at  least,  go  to  another  city.  On  this  I  decided  I 
would  go  to  Mr.  W.  E.  Dodge  and  have  a  frank  talk  with  him. 
Up  to  this  point,  not  a  soul  but  the  woman  and  myself  knew  of 
our  arrangement. 

Mr.  Dodge  gave  me  an  appointment,  and  I  laid  the  facts 
as  I  have  stated  them  here  before  him.  I  said,  "Mr.  Dodge,  I 
have  given  this  good  woman  money;  so  long  as  she  goes  in  and 
out  among  the  tenement  houses,  I  will  continue  to  give  her 
money.  You  now  know  the  facts.  Will  you  not  call  Mr. 
Comstockoff?" 

Mr.  Dodge  was  exceedingly  kind  and  patient  with  me,  for 
I  used  as  strong  language  as  I  knew  how  in  denouncing  the  law, 
and  the  manifest,  wicked  folly  of  enforcing  it.  What  he  him- 
self thought  he  did  not  say.     But  I  got  no  promise  from  him. 


342  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

The  fact  was,  Mr.  Comstock  was  in  the  saddle  and  New  York 
was  afraid  of  him. 

After  this  talk,  Mr.  Dodge  had  a  perfect  right  to  drag  me 
into  a  mess  if  he  and  his  society  so  wished.     I  told  him  I  would 

continue  to  finance  Mrs. as  long  as  she  continued  to  do  her 

work. 

How  mixed  up  things  are  among  us  poor  humans,  trying  to 
do  right !  I  know  Mr.  Dodge  did  not  think  the  worse  of  me  for 
my  very  plain-spoken  criticism  of  his  society,  and  yet  he  would 
do  nothing  to  make  Mr.  Comstock  hold  his  hand.  Perhaps 
he  had  not  the  power  to  do  so.  I  am  not  sure  of  the  end  of  this 
story. 

I  had  a  sharp  attack  of  rheumatism  and  was  obliged  to  go  to 
the  Hot  Springs  for  a  cure.     When  I  returned,  I  was  told  in  an 

anonymous   letter  that  Mrs.  had  committed  suicide.     I 

never  was  able  to  verify  the  report.  I  went  to  Mr.  Comstock 
and  told  him  what  I  had  heard.  He  flatly  denied  that  he  knew 
anything  about  it.  But  Mr.  Comstock's  denials  were  not  al- 
ways convincing.  Alas,  silence  fell  between  us,  and  I  never 
heard  from  Mrs.  again. 

Not  long  after  my  difference  with  Mr.  Dodge,  a  monster 
meeting  of  the  unemployed  was  held  in  Madison  Square  Gar- 
den. There  were  more  than  14,000  men  present.  Speakers 
had  some  difficulty  in  gaining  a  hearing.  The  working  peo- 
ple knew  I  sympathized  with  them  in  the  great  distress  then 
prevalent.  They  knew  I  stood  for  justice  and  a  square  deal, 
which  they  had  not  always  had.  And  when  I  stood  up  they 
were  silent  and  gave  me  a  hearing. 

The  next  morning  a  letter1  of  warm  congratulation  came  to 
me  from  Mr.  Dodge,  and  his  writing  as  he  did,  under  the  cir- 
cumstances he  did,  not  only  touched  me  deeply,  but  made  me 
feel  that  Mr.  Dodge  did  not,  in  his  heart  of  hearts,  feel  con- 
fident that  he  was  altogether  right  and  I  altogether  wrong. 

I  look  back  on  those  years  in  the  'qjd's  with  satisfaction.  The 
small  part  I  took  in  advocating  reforms  was  taken  with  de- 

,,,         _.      _  Jan.  20,  i8q-j. 

'Dear  Dr.  Rainsford:  j  '      yj 

I  cannot  go  to  sleep  to-night  without  telling  you  again — [he  had  shaken  every  hand  on  the 

platform  at  the  time] — how  much  I  thank  you  for  your  splendid,  earnest,  and  most  sensible 

talk  this  evening.     It  was  quite  a  miracle  to  be  able  to  grip  and  hold  and  interest  those  tired 

people  as  you  did.  Gratefully  Yours, 

W.  E.  Dodge. 


ANTI-ISM  343 

liberation.  Critics  said  I  acted  as  I  did  in  order  to  get  noto- 
riety. Of  that  charge  my  conscience  freed  me.  I  did  what  I 
did  after  a  careful  survey  of  actual  conditions,  and  not  till  I 
had  consulted  the  wisest  and  most  public-spirited  men  I  knew 
— and  first  among  these  was  Abram  Hewitt.  They,  of  course, 
did  not  always  agree  with  me,  but  by  way  of  this  criticism  I 
had  the  advantage  of  other  men's  points  of  view  who  were  in 
sympathy  with  reform. 

Abram  Hewitt,  after  his  retirement  from  public  life,  was  be- 
yond question  the  first  citizen  in  New  York,  and  during  those 
years  he  was  an  invaluable  friend  to  me.  Excepting  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  I  think  Mr.  Hewitt  was  the  ablest,  most  cultured, 
and  certainly  most  honest  politician  I  ever  knew.  Some  said 
he  lacked  tact  in  dealing  with  his  fellows.  Of  this  I  cannot 
judge.  All  I  do  know  is,  he  was  mighty  kind  to  me.  Why 
his  capacity  and  character  did  not  receive  a  wider  public  recog- 
nition I  never  understood.  All  he  had  and  was,  he  ever  placed 
at  his  country's  service.  And  when  he  chose  to  exercise  it, 
his  personal  charm  was  as  remarkable  as  his  erudition.  He 
knew  New  York  from  the  Battery  to  Harlem,  both  its  political 
parties,  their  leaders,  and  their  rank  and  file.  He  knew  Wash- 
ington. He  was  extraordinarily  acute  and  brilliant  in  his 
judgment  of  men,  and  at  a  time  when  money  was  sought  more 
persistently  than  it  ever  had  been,  Abram  Hewitt  cared  noth- 
ing about  money. 

Mr.  and  Mrs.  Peter  Barlow  were  friends  of  ours  in  those 
early  days.  (Barlow  afterward  became  a  useful  and  popular 
magistrate.)  We  dined  together  sometimes,  and  Barlow  de- 
termined that  I  should  meet  Mr.  Hewitt  at  dinner,  which  I  did. 
That  first  night  of  our  meeting,  Mr.  Hewitt  was  so  kind  as  to 
let  me  feel  that  he  would  like  to  see  more  of  me.  "I  am  a 
rather  lonely  old  man,"  he  said;  "if  you  are  ever  free  of  an 
evening  and  could  come  and  spend  an  hour  in  my  library,  I 
would  be  glad." 

So  rejoicingly  I  went  and  sat  at  his  feet,  and  learned  more 
from  him  about  New  York,  its  needs  and  dangers,  and  what 
might  and  might  not  be  possible  to  do  for  it,  than  any  other  man 
in  its  two  and  a  half  millions  could  have  taught  me. 

For  reliable  information  and  for  cordial  and  understanding 
encouragement,  I  owe  much  to  Abram  Hewitt. 


344  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

When  in  company,  Mr.  Hewitt  was  often  silent.  He  suffered 
from  dyspepsia  and  showed  it.  When  alone  with  him,  or  in  a 
small  and  congenial  party,  he  was,  with  the  sole  exception 
of  Clarence  King,  the  most  brilliant  conversationalist  I  ever 
listened  to. 

One  dinner  with  him  stands  out  in  my  memory.  It  was  on 
April  12, 1899,  and  again  Peter  Barlow  was  our  host.  He,  Doc- 
tor Huntington,  and  I  were  the  party.  I  made  some  notes  of 
what  he  said  at  the  time,  and  rewrote  them  when  I  went  home 
that  night.  Here  I  put  them  down  as  recorded  in  my  note- 
book. 

Mr.  H.  very  brilliant.  Told  story  of  Tilden-Hays  election.  Mr.  H. 
chairman  of  National  Democratic  Committee.  Mr.  H.  also  on  Committee 
of  Thirteen.  Eight  Republicans  and  seven  Democrats  on  whose  vote  and 
decision  the  acceptance  of  the  electoral  vote  for  Louisiana  depended. 

Mr.  H.  said,  "John  Sherman  bought  the  Louisiana  return  for  #200,000, 
paying  #60,000  cash.     More  cash  afterwards;  the  balance  in  offices." 

Mr.  H.  then  told  of  the  prayer  meeting  at  Mr.  Frelinghuy sen's  house, 
when  Mr.  Frelinghuysen  himself  made  a  long  prayer,  calling  on  God  to  reveal 
to  Chief  Justice  Bradley  that  he  was  raised  up  of  God  to  give  a  decision  in 
favour  of  the  Republican  party.  Chief  Justice  Bradley  had  written  his  deci- 
sion over  night,  and  had  read  it  to  several  men.  In  the  morning  he  added  a 
sentence,  viz.:  "Notwithstanding,  I  vote  for,  etc.,  etc."  "See,"  said  Mr. 
Hewitt,  "  the  power  of  prayer!" 

Said  Mr.  Hewitt,  "The  wonderful  thing  was  they  all  thought  they  were 
right."  "Though,"  he  added,  "John  Sherman  can  never  look  me  in  the  face 
since." 

"So,"  said  I,  "did  the  Republican  party  think  it  was  right  to  spend  millions 
in  bribery  in  order  to  elect  Mr.  McKinley!" 

"And  so  they  were,"  said  Mr.  Hewitt.  "Anything  was  right  to  save  us 
from  free  silver  and  Populism." 

Strange!  John  Sherman  cannot  look  Mr.  Hewitt  in  the  face  because  he, 
John  Sherman,  has  bought  Louisiana's  election  returns  for  $200,000.  But 
Hanna  and  crew  do  nothing  wrong  in  spending  millions  in  buying  votes  for 
McKinley.  One  buys  the  officers  who  hold  the  urns.  The  other  buys  the 
votes  before  they  are  placed  in  the  urns.  Strange!  Strange!  I  suppose 
some  of  the  moral  conclusions  and  distinctions  we  make  to-day  may  seem  as 
difficult  of  explanation  to  our  children's  children. 

With  one  more  short  note  from  the  kindest  and  most  con- 
siderate Bishop  a  "reckless,  radical  rector"  ever  had,  I  close 
this  poor  sketch  of  my  very  happy  contendings  with  "anti- 
ism." 


ANTI-ISM  345 

My  doctor  had  ordered  me  to  take  some  two  weeks'  rest  in 
mid-winter.     I  grew  to  be  very  tired  after  preaching. 

My  dear  Boy: 

I  have  communicated  with  Bishop  C.  If  he  cannot  preach  for  you,  I  can. 
In  any  case,  give  yourself  no  concern.  I  will  see  that  your  pulpit  is  adorned 
with  a  pair  of  lawn  sleeves.  Don't  worry.  Accept  cheerfully  the  discipline 
of  inaction,  and  rely  unreservedly  on  the  love  and  loyalty  of  those  you  have 
left  behind  you. 

Ever  yours, 

H.  C.  P. 

When  I  was  in  trouble,  I  always  had  sympathetic  and  fath- 
erly help  from  dear  H.  C.  P.,  and  a  letter  of  his  reached  me  in 
the  wilds  of  Africa  shortly  before  he  died.  With  it  he  sent  a 
large  batch  of  newest  books.  I  carried  that  precious  letter  in 
a  little  leather  bag  which  also  contained  my  cash.  That  little 
bag  was  stolen  (the  only  thing  I  had  stolen  in  these  years)  by 
a  Wakamba  porter  who  slipped  away  from  the  other  porters 
while  we  were  cutting  our  way  through  a  particularly  bad  piece 
of  forest.  Kongoni,  my  Wakamba  gunbearer,  was  so  put  out 
by  the  faithlessness  of  his  fellow-tribesman,  that  he  asked  my 
permission  to  take  his  trail — and  hunt  him  down.  At  that  time 
we  were  in  very  wild  country  many  hundreds  of  miles  from  the 
coast.  Kongoni  went  off  alone.  Two  months  later  he  brought 
me  the  thief  chained.  The  man  still  had  the  bag,  but  of  course 
cash  and  letter  were  gone. 

Many  a  loving  message  I  had  from  my  dear  Bishop,  but 
above  them  all  I  valued  this  last  lost  letter. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 

The  Protestant  Episcopal  Church 

When  religion  has  become  an  orthodoxy  its  day  of  inwardness  is  over. — 
W.  James. 

I  have  never  united  myself  to  any  church  because  I  have  found  diffi- 
culty in  giving  my  assent  without  mental  reservation  to  the  long,  com- 
plicated statements  of  Christian  doctrine  which  characterize  the  articles 
of  belief  and  confessions  of  faith.  When  any  church  will  inscribe  on  its 
altar,  as  its  sole  qualification  of  membership,  the  Saviour's  condensed 
statement  of  the  substance  of  both  law  and  gospel,  "  Thou  shalt  love  the 
Lord  thy  God  with  all  thy  heart  and  with  all  thy  soul  and  with  all  thy 
mind,  and  thy  neighbour  as  thyself,"  that  church  will  I  join  with  all  my 
heart  and  all  my  soul. — A.  Lincoln.  (Frank  B.  Carpenter's  "Life.") 

I  have  some  things  to  say,  not  of  one  church  but  of  all  the 
churches,  which  must  be  said  even  if  it  is  a  hard  thing  to  say 
them.  Then,  further,  some  things  to  say  about  the  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church.  Not  in  doctrine,  not  in  practical  service, 
not  in  social  vision,  do  the  churches  fit  the  time. 

To  this  wholesale  condemnation  churchmen  usually  make  a 
reply  that  seems  to  them  adequate.  "The  Church  was  not  in- 
tended to  fit  the  time,  but  to  leaven  and  reform  and  Christian- 
ize it." 

I  admit  it.  But  how  do  you  propose  to  do  this?  There  is 
only  one  way — an  old  way,  a  New  Testament  way — "By  com- 
mending the  truth  to  every  man's  conscience  in  the  sight  of 
God,"  and  if  any  one  contends  that  the  modern  church  is  suc- 
ceeding in  this  duty,  I  have  no  time,  I  fear,  to  dispute  with  him. 

All  churchmen  admit  that  the  church  exists  for  humanity  at 
large,  but  it  is  evident  that  to  lead  and  win  humanity,  she  must 
fit  herself  to  the  advance  of  human  knowledge  and  human  re- 
quirement. I  have  stressed  in  many  places  in  this  story  the 
evident  reason  of  her  failure  to  do  this.  It  is  because  she  has 
left  the  path  her  Master  trod.  She  has  ceased  to  follow  the 
example  of  Jesus,  the  great  Truthbringer.     She  has  failed  to 

346 


THE  PROTESTANT  EPISCOPAL  CHURCH     347 

grasp  the  one  supreme  central  idea  of  His  Life.  The  age  we 
live  in  is  striving  toward  the  ideal  of  Jesus.  The  church  that 
claims  to  explain  and  champion  and  represent  Him  is  forgetting 
it. 

Hear  Him,  in  the  gray  dawn  of  His  last  morning  on  earth, 
when,  crushed  and  shaken  in  body,  forsaken  and  misunder- 
stood, he  faced  the  final  torture  of  the  cross.  "  For  this  cause 
was  I  born,  for  this  cause  came  I  into  the  world,  to  bear  witness 
to  the  truth." 

Let  that  mighty  challenge  ring  out  once  more,  and  not  since 
he  uttered  it  would  the  response  to  it,  to  Him,  be  so  prompt,  so 
universal.  ; 

No  observant  man  can  doubt  for  an  instant  that,  in  a  pecu- 
liarly universal  degree,  our  age  is  truth-loving,  truth-seeking. 
Moreover,  in  its  search  for  truth,  it  has  an  evident  and  an  ex- 
alted purpose.  That  purpose  is  the  service  of  mankind. 
Offer  this  and  volunteers  crowd.  No  danger  holds  them  back, 
no  difficulties  daunt  them.  Men  and  women  "count  not  their 
lives  dear  to  themselves"  if  they  can  but  open  wider  the  human 
pathway  to  happiness  and  good. 

These  people  often  think  they  have  no  religion,  yet  are  willing 
resolutely  to  die  to  perfect  some  discovery  that  has  just  a  hope 
in  it  of  lessening  pain  or  prolonging  life.  If  this  is  not  religion, 
what  is?  Truth  for  truth's  sake,  and  for  man's  sake,  never 
shone  with  such  radiance  of  alluring  beauty  before  a  generation 
of  seeking,  worshipping  mankind.  Men  love  her,  follow  her, 
serve  her,  die  for  her,  as  never  before.  But  less  and  less  do  they 
heed  or  care  for  or  believe  in  the  Church,  for  they  do  not  believe 
that  the  Church  cares  for  the  truth  as  she  used  to  care,  any 
longer. 

But  I  would  not  deal  in  generalities  only.  I  point  to  specific 
causes  of  failure  in  my  own  church,  the  Protestant  Episcopal. 
The  doctrines  supposed  to  be  held  by  her  ministers  are  ex- 
pressed in  language  of  a  long  past.  They  represented  men's 
reasoned  judgment  then;  they  often  outrage  it  now.  The 
clergy  have  to  explain  them  away,  and  but  few  of  them  have 
scholarship  sufficient  to  do  this  difficult  thing  satisfactorily, 
even  if  they  wish  to  do  it.  Jowett's  witty  cynicism  has  truth 
in  it,  "  You  must  try  to  believe  in  God,  spite  of  what  the  clergy 
say." 


348  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

But  the  cause  of  error  and  of  consequent  weakness  lies  deeper 
than  this  admitted  inability  of  the  clergy  to  explain. 

It  lies  in  their  mistaken  concept  of  the  nature  of  Religious 
Truth  itself.  They  view  "the  faith  once  delivered  to  the 
saints"  as  a  golden  brick,  not  as  a  living,  growing,  flowering, 
fruiting  seed,  which  Jesus  said  it  was. 

They  insist  on  an  accurate,  complete,  final  statement  of  the 
Truth.  If  they  would  but  stop  and  think,  pause  long  enough 
to  read  a  little  history,  two  things  would  be  evident  to  them. 
First,  that  a  "finished"  truth  is,  from  the  very  nature  of  truth, 
a  lie.  And  next,  that  it  invariably  becomes  not  a  passive, 
harmless  sort  of  lie,  but  an  active  lie;  in  short,  an  idol,  as  the 
brazen  serpent  of  old  was  first  a  symbol  of  salvation;  but  when 
the  Jews  would  make  it  more  than  a  symbol,  and  worshipped  it, 
became  a  deadly  error,  an  idol  to  be  stamped  out. 

But  the  masses  of  religious-minded  people  cannot  be  ex- 
pected to  reason  these  things  out  for  themselves.  They  can- 
not recast  old  creeds  and  offices.  They  must  take  what  the 
Church  puts  in  their  hands,  and  so  we  are  back  again  at  man- 
uals of  religion,  excellent  in  their  own  day,  and  most  certainly 
full  of  misleadings  in  the  present  day. 

The  Bible  itself,  our  matchless  Book  of  Common  Prayer, 
our  rich  Hymnology — all  full  of  faults;  not  one  of  them  a  per- 
fect thing,  not  one  of  them  anything  more  than  a  crutch  to  help 
us  poor  "cripples  of  God"  to  hobble  toward  our  Father.  If 
the  Church  would  but  offer  them  for  what  they  are,  they  are 
invaluable.  But  insist  on  their  acceptance  as  complete  and 
final,  and  you  drive  out  of  the  Church  the  honest  and  educated, 
the  very  people  on  whose  presence  within  her,  her  health  and 
growth,  yes,  her  very  life,  depend. 

Still  I  am  "not  specific!"  Well,  take  one  of  a  multitude  of 
instances.  When  we  bring  our  dead  to  the  open  grave,  our 
church  orders  these  words  to  be  said  or  sung;  their  sonorous 
splendour  is  almost  unmatched  in  English  prose: 


Man  that  is  born  of  a  woman  hath  but  a  short  time  to  live  and  is  full  of 
misery.  He  cometh  up  and  is  cut  down  like  a  flower;  he  fleeth  as  a  shadow 
and  never  continueth  in  one  stay.  In  the  midst  of  life  we  are  in  death.  Of 
whom  may  we  seek  for  succour  but  of  Thee,  O  Lord,  Who  for  our  sins  art 
justly  displeased? 


THE  PROTESTANT  EPISCOPAL  CHURCH     349 

Yet,  O  Lord  God  most  holy,  O  Lord  most  mighty,  O  holy  and  most  merciful 
Saviour,  deliver  us  not  into  the  bitter  pains  of  eternal  death. 

Thou  knowest,  Lord,  the  secrets  of  our  hearts.  Shut  not  Thy  merciful 
ear  to  our  prayer,  but  spare  us,  Lord  most  holy,  O  God  most  mighty,  O 
holy  and  merciful  Saviour,  Thou  most  worthy  Judge  eternal,  suffer  us  not, 
at  our  last  hour,  for  any  pains  of  death,  to  fall  from  Thee. 

Would  it  be  possible  to  put  in  nobler  language  a  more  un- 
worthy estimate  of  the  love  and  mercy  of  God?  Here  is  the 
wailing  of  a  heathen  anguish,  nothing  higher,  and  nothing 
more.  What  an  intolerable  conception  of  God!  What  a 
travesty  of  the  Gospel  of  Jesus!  What  a  mockery  of  the 
Christian  hope! 

I  shall  not  go  further  into  the  discussion  of  doctrinal  state- 
ments, for  the  subject  is  unprofitable.  The  Bible  and  Prayer- 
Book  are  full  of  things  that  stated  as  they  there  are  are  no  longer 
true. 

We  older  people,  dwelling  on  our  religious  past,  are  hypno- 
tized by  its  memories.  We  still,  at  least  partially,  think  and 
worship  in  its  terms.  Old  formularies  are  precious,  and  we 
hold  to  them  by  reading  new  meanings  into  them.  But  to  the 
younger,  keener,  more  analytical  spirit  of  our  children,  this  is 
not  possible,  and  they  will  not  tolerate  things  that  seem  to 
them  manifestly  untrue. 

With  that  spirit  of  the  children  the  Church  has  little  sym- 
pathy. She  does  not  understand  it,  or  know  how  to  meet  it. 
Like  the  Jewish  Church  that  discarded  Jesus,  she  is  so  wedded 
to  a  past  God  that  she  cannot  see  a  present  God;  so  faithful  to  a 
past  time  that  she  cannot  believe  in  a  present  time.  Her  past 
strangles  and  gags  her.  She  staggers  to  battle,  weighted  down 
in  an  intolerably  complete  suit  of  armour,  every  little  bit  of  it 
guaranteed  ancient  and  genuine.  In  order  to  fight,  she  must 
strip,  but  an  exaggerated  and  perverted  sense  of  religious 
decency  forbids  her  stripping.  So,  for  any  radical  reform,  she 
is  quite  unprepared.  She  cannot  remodel  her  offices  or  re- 
state her  creeds.  To  attempt  it  at  present  would  be  suicide. 
She  would  be  torn  to  pieces  in  the  process.  And  yet  to  do  this 
is  a  vital  necessity. 

The  Church  is  holding  back  from  the  complete  reinterpreta- 
tion  of  all  her  doctrines  that  an  acceptance  of  Evolution  must 
involve.     But  since  she  must   face  such   a  reinterpretation, 


350  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

hesitation  is  disastrous  to  herself  and  to  the  world.  The 
docile  and  obedient  multitudes  she  once  commanded  are  slowly- 
melting  away,  while  to  other  increasing  multitudes  the  forms 
and  phrasing  of  popular  Christian  statement  are  becoming  un- 
satisfactory or  intolerable. 

For  myself,  so  far  as  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  is 
concerned,  I  feel  like  saying,  "I  believe  in  the  Church  of  one 
hundred  years  hence." 

There  is  one  thing,  however,  that  I  think  the  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church  might  do,  and  it  would  be  a  wise  and  signifi- 
cant thing  to  do  it.  Furthermore,  it  is  idle  to  propose  any 
real  reform  measures  till  it  is  done,  for  it  must  be  pre- 
liminary to  any  doctrinal  reforms.  That  is,  to  democratize 
the  Church's  governing  body.  Make  it  representative,  make 
it  akin  to  the  other  representative  institutions  of  the  country; 
as  at  present  constituted,  neither  the  Diocesan  conventions, 
meeting  annually,  nor  the  General  Convention,  meeting  tri- 
ennially,  are  really  representative  at  all. 

To  protect  minorities  is  but  right.  This  our  church  does. 
But  so  to  gerrymander  the  Church's  representation  that  her 
minorities  can,  and  often  do,  outvote  large  majorities,  is  as 
foolish  as  it  is  dishonest.  This  is  the  actual,  the  undisputed 
condition  in  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  to-day. 

The  parish  is  the  first  unit.  The  diocese  the  second.  All 
parishes  great  and  small  have  the  same  voice,  the  same  equal 
voting  power,  in  the  Diocesan  Convention.  All  the  Dioceses, 
great  and  small,  have  the  same  voice,  the  same  voting  power, 
in  the  General  Convention,  which  is  the  Congress  of  the  Church. 

To  illustrate  what  I  say:  I  am,  at  the  moment  of  writing,  stay- 
ing in  the  parish  of  Lewisboro,  New  York.  Now  Lewisboro,  a 
small  country  parish,  that  certainly  has  not  twenty-five  actual 
communicants,  has  exactly  the  same  voice  and  power  in  the 
Diocesan  Convention  of  New  York  as  had  St.  George's  Church 
when  I  was  its  rector,  and  St.  George's  had  certainly  more 
than  five  thousand  bona-fide  communicants.  See  how  this 
system  of  unjust  representation  works  in  the  General  Conven- 
tion. In  the  Diocese  of  New  York  there  are  four  hundred  and 
twenty  clergy;  in  Pennsylvania,  three  hundred  and  nine; 
in  Massachusetts,  two  hundred  and  fifty.  In  the  Diocese  of 
Marquette  there  are  nineteen  clergy;  yet  in  the  councils  of  our 


THE  PROTESTANT  EPISCOPAL  CHURCH     351 

church,  that  diocese  has  precisely  the  same  power  to  direct  and 
change  the  course  of  our  sociological  or  doctrinal  policy  as  have 
any  one  of  these  great  dioceses. 

Let  me  put  it  another  way.  Thirteen  of  our  dioceses  have 
all  of  them  together  but  four  hundred  and  seventeen  clergy. 
The  Diocese  of  New  York  has  four  hundred  and  twenty.  These 
thirteen  cast  in  convention  fifty-two  clerical  and  fifty-two  lay 
votes — one  hundred  and  four  in  all — as  against  New  York's 
four  clerical  and  four  lay  votes.  The  system  has  the  extraor- 
dinary result  that  dioceses  feeble  in  numbers  and  resources, 
dioceses  where  our  church  has  no  real  grasp  on  any  class  of  the 
population,  have  an  overwhelmingly  disproportionate  repre- 
sentation in  the  supreme  legislative  body  of  the  Church.  The 
feeble  rule  the  strong.  This  is  a  new  kind,  and  a  very  bad  kind, 
of  autocracy. 

I  have  travelled  a  great  deal  in  the  United  States.  I  have 
preached  or  lectured  in  eighteen  universities.  And,  looking 
round  me  everywhere,  the  absurdity  and  harm  fulness  of  our 
church's  system  of  representation  grew  on  me.  Till  this  an- 
omaly is  removed,  this  first  manifestly  righteous  reform  put 
through,  the  tail  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  will  wag 
the  body  of  that  church,  which  is  a  state  of  things  we  are  taught 
is  impossibly  unnatural,  even  in  the  case  of  a  dog. 

During  the  latter  years  of  my  ministry,  I  discussed  this  ques- 
tion of  readjustment  of  the  churches'  representation  con- 
stantly. But  I  could  not  see  that  I  gained  anything.  The 
question  was  regarded  as  academic.  "The  smaller  dioceses 
will  never  consent,"  was  my  answer. 

The  failure  of  good  men  to  welcome  even  a  church-wide  con- 
flict to  win  this  reform,  if  such  was  necessary,  amazed  me.  I 
knew  my  own  limitations  too  well  to  attempt  to  lead  an  attack 
in  our  own  convention.  I  had  no  gift  as  a  debater.  I  found  I 
could  do  something  with  the  clerical  mind  when  it  was  in  its 
very  youthful  and  formative  stage,  but  I  never  did,  and  never 
could,  by  argument  win  or  influence  it  to  any  observable  degree 
once  it  was  mature. 

Doctor  Huntington,  of  Grace  Church,  was  easily  the  leader 
in  our  convention  in  those  years,  and  I  tried  to  convince  him 
of  the  immediate  necessity  of  this  great  and  preliminary  reform. 
I  had  several  long  talks  with  Doctor  Huntington,  and  in  prin- 


35* 


THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 


ciple  he  agreed.  But  the  trouble  with  Doctor  Huntington  was 
that  his  approach  to  a  question  was  that  of  a  lawyer  rather 
than  that  of  a  statesman,  and  these  two  so  sharply  differentiated 
qualities  it  is  hard  to  find  in  one  man. 

I  remember  one  day,  after  a  long  discussion  in  his  study,  I 
told  him  the  story  of  Bishop  Magee's  reply  to  the  man  who 
asked  him  what  it  was  that  the  English  bishops  had  been  so 
hotly  debating  all  that  day.  "Oh,"  said  Magee,  "they  have 
been  fighting  over  the  papering  of  the  attic,  while  the  basement 
was  on  fire." 

I  could  not  flatter  myself  that  Doctor  Huntington  saw  the 
relevancy  of  the  story.  So  he  gave  years  of  study,  and  called 
on  all  his  fine  powers  of  compromise  and  of  debate,  to  carry 
through  a  revision  of  the  Book  of  Common  Prayer.  And  in 
truth  all  that  revision  even  attempted  to  do  was  what  the  dif- 
fering bishops,  as  Magee  said,  had  been  fighting  about — just 
a  papering  of  an  attic. 

These  are  not  the  first  days  in  which  the  spirit  of  the  people 
has  got  beyond,  has  gone  ahead  of,  the  Church's  standards  of 
right  and  duty.  It  was  a  tidal  wave  of  spiritual  power  that 
moved  and  inspired  our  whole  land  to  break  with  all  the  cher- 
ished traditions  of  its  history,  and  force  the  late  administration 
into  war.  That  spirit  is  not  dead.  It  will  take,  it  is  now  tak- 
ing, new  forms.  It  is  the  same  spirit  that  slowly  gathered 
force  in  those  eventful  years  of  the  Eighteenth  Century.  Then  it 
smote  down  the  divine  right  of  kings.  It  is  the  same  spirit  that, 
in  1 861-6,  at  first  slowly,  and  unsure  of  itself  and  of  its  duty, 
at  last' saw  both  clearly  and  gave  us  a  slave-free  and  united  land. 
It  is  the  same  spirit  again,  following  just  the  same  course,  often 
poorly  led,  and  so,  often  stumbling,  which  only  yesterday  took 
a  step  forward  that  will  have  profoundly  important  results  in 
the  future:  that  insisted  on  placing  its  women  on  a  political 
equality  with  its  men. 

And  yet  once  more.  Not  satisfied  with  these  triumphs  of 
reform,  undismayed  it  faces  to-day  another  struggle;  it 
pledges  itself  to  another  reform.  It  has  broken  the  power  of 
Kings.  It  has  abolished  slavery.  It  has  emancipated  women. 
As  surely  will  it  in  time  insure  a  newer  and  better  social  order 
in  which  there  will  be  a  fairer  division  of  the  proceeds  of  their 
industry  among  men. 


THE  PROTESTANT  EPISCOPAL  CHURCH     353 

Every  one  of  these  revolutionary  changes  that  have  been 
accomplished  the  Church  herself  now  accepts  as  wise  and  neces- 
sary. But  what  share  has  she  had  as  an  organization  in  win- 
ning any  one  of  them  ? 

On  the  contrary,  she  has  often  discredited  and  silenced  any 
of  her  clergy  who  advocated  them.  In  1776  she  was  for  king 
against  country,  and  her  blindness  then  nearly  cost  her  her  life. 
In  1 861-6  she  was  for  slavery  and  disunion  in  the  South,  and 
in  the  North  she  was  divided.  The  freed  slave  owes  little  to  her. 
Later,  on  woman's  claim  to  political  equality  she  was  silent 
when  not  opposed  to  it. 

For  more  than  thirty  years  the  struggle  between  capital- 
ists and  their  labour  has  profoundly  disturbed  our  land.  Above 
the  noise  and  confusion  of  that  conflict,  certain  things  are 
clear.  At  first  capitalists  had  their  way,  and  often  the  things 
they  did  were  indefensible, unjust,  and  tyrannous  in  the  extreme. 
The  wrong  they  were  guilty  of  in  their  day  of  power  was  not  a 
wrong  done  to  their  employees  alone.  It  was  a  wrong  done  to 
every  man,  woman,  and  child  in  the  nation.  Now  Labour  is 
steadily  gaining  power,  and  still  more  power;  and  it  aims  to  do, 
and  sometimes  has  already  done,  things  just  as  unjust,  just  as 
harmful  to  the  whole  land,  as  the  offending  capitalists  were 
guilty  of. 

What  help  or  guidance  to  the  right  cause,  what  rebuke  to 
the  wrong,  has  the  Church  given  ?  She  is  powerless  to-day  to 
rebuke  what  is  sometimes  grossly  unpatriotic  and  unfair  in  the 
labour  unionist.  Why?  Because,  years  ago,  she  turned  a 
deaf  ear  to  the  bitter  cry  of  the  oppressed  and  disunited  labour- 
ing people,  when  they  were  demanding  only  what  was  alto- 
gether just  and  right:  common  justice  and  a  square  deal.  But 
she  has  learned  nothing.  Her  policy  still,  so  far  as  she  has  any 
policy  at  all,  is  one  of  maintaining  things  as  they  are. 

She  glories  in  her  proved  ability  to  hold  a  middle  course. 
The  one  policy  she  always  stands  for  is  safety.  Give  her  safe 
clergy,  safe  leaders,  safe  bishops,  and  all  will  be  well.  She 
protests  she  is  a  soldier  of  the  Cross,  but  a  new  sort  of  soldier,  a 
soldier  who  seeks  safety.  She  defends  her  non-committal 
policy  on  questions  of  right  and  wrong  by  quoting  one  text 
from  the  New  Testament,  in  which  Jesus  refuses  to  settle  a 
dispute  between  two  brothers  as  to  the  division  of  their  father's 


354  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

estate.  As  if  Jesus  ever  hedged  on  a  moral  question!  So, 
steadily,  stupidly,  wrapped  in  a  self-satisfied  blindness,  she 
pursues  an  untroubled  way,  a  modern  reproduction  of  the  an- 
cient church  of  Laodicea.  (A  church  that  was  neither  cold 
nor  hot.  See  Rev.  Ill,  15-16.)  A  lukewarm  church  and  a 
tepid  message,  in  a  day  and  to  a  nation  that  are  contemptuous 
of  both. 

If  the  Church  believes  in  the  promise  of  her  Master,  if  she 
believes  in  the  ever-living,  inspiring  spirit  of  God,  as  she  pro- 
fesses to  do,  let  her  give  some  evidence  of  it  that  men  can  see. 
Orderly  services,  stately  ritual,  and  persistent  declarations  of 
the  obvious  are  not  enough.  She  must  show  she  can  guide 
by  having  clergy  and  lay  people  in  her  ranks  who  are  guides; 
that  she  can  teach  by  having  teachers  in  her  pulpits,  her  colleges, 
and  her  seminaries  who  are  teaching. 

If  she  believes  that  God  is  for  man  and  in  man,  a  mighty 
creative  and  recreative  power,  ever  pushing  all  things  on — 
the  free  to  a  freer ,  the  just  to  a  juster,  the  good  to  a  better — then 
her  acts  must  show  that  she  believes  in  a  present  guidance  of 
the  affairs  of  men,  as  in  the  past.  In  short,  a  present  and  ac- 
tive Holy  Ghost.  The  church  that  shows  signs  of  this  sort  of 
life  will  not  fail  either  of  a  hearing  or  of  influence. 

The  Church  has  one  duty,  one  she  cannot  depute :  that  is  to 
educate  the  children  of  God.  To  educate  she  must  understand; 
to  understand  she  must  sympathize;  to  sympathize  she  must 
know.  What  avails  it  to  insist  she  has  divine  guidance  if, 
perpetually,  she  is  silent  on  those  things  men  and  women  are 
debating  in  their  inmost  souls?  If  she  would  show  the  world 
any  real  desire  to  recast  her  creeds  and  dogmas  in  terms  of  to- 
day, frankly  recognizing  that  historic  and  scientific  learning 
have  made  a  restatement  necessary,  multitudes  would  turn  to 
her  with  fresh  hope  and  a  new  obedience. 

But  this  is  a  difficult  thing  for  any  and  all  of  the  orthodox 
churches  now  to  do.  They  are  hampered  by  their  past  course 
of  action.  The  root  mistake  they  have  made,  and  none  of  them 
have  made  it  quite  so  persistently  as  has  the  Protestant  Episco- 
pal Church,  has  been  in  the  diverting  of  this  divinely  entrusted 
work  of  the  teacher  into  an  assumption  of  a  religious  control 
over  the  taught.  Not  so  much  a  patient  purpose  to  seek  and 
find  spiritual  values,  as  a  growing  will  to  impose  a  doctrinal 


THE  PROTESTANT  EPISCOPAL  CHURCH     355 

and  sacramental  system;  an  assumption  of  power,  rather  than 
a  seeking  for  truth. 

Such  a  policy  courts  rebellion,  for  it  would  impose  a  mastery. 
It  justifies  the  thoughtful  William  James's  far-reaching  protest 
against  the  churches  of  his  time:  "When  a  religion  has  become 
an  orthodoxy,  its  day  of  inwardness  is  over." 

Shortly  before  I  left  New  York,  I  went  once  more  to  see  my 
kind  friend  and  neighbour,  Doctor  Huntington.  I  took  up  the 
old  question  of  reform  with  him.  He  listened  to  all  I  had  to 
say,  again  referring  to  the  certainty  of  a  united  opposition  from 
the  small  dioceses  as  an  almost  insuperable  objection.  I  could 
not  make  him  see  the  profound  political  immorality  of  the 
contention.  Some  years  after,  the  Rev.  Karl  Reiland,  at  the 
time  senior  assistant  to  Doctor  Huntington,  told  me  that 
Doctor  Huntington  had  said  to  him:  "I  am  going  to  devote  the 
remaining  years  of  my  life  to  fighting  for  a  constitutional  reform 
of  our  churches'  representation,  Diocesan  and  Conventional." 
A  few  months  afterward  he  died. 

I  conclude  this  chapter  by  quoting  from  an  old  sermon  I 
preached  twenty-seven  years  ago  that  seems  to  have  a  meaning 
for  these  troubled  days  of  192 1,  and  by  printing  a  letter  lately 
written  to  a  friend  who  since  then  has  become  Bishop  of  New 
York. 

Look  where  you  will  to-day,  everywhere  men  are  dissatisfied,  uncertain, 
hungry.  The  growing  pains  of  life  are  not  easy  to  bear,  and  there  are  few 
pangs  as  keen  as  are  the  birth  pangs  of  new  ideas.  Man's  aims  and  hopes 
he  has  not  yet  formulated.  It  may  be  he  is  turning  away  from  the  visible 
forms  of  Christianity.  If  so,  this  does  not  prove  the  decay  or  death  of  the 
religious  instinct  within  him,  but  rather  gives  proof  of  its  persistent  vitality. 

The  old  altars  are  falling  into  decay;  the  new  are  not  yet  builded.  Mean- 
while, man's  unquenchable  desire  for  God  expresses  itself  in  a  vague  yearning. 

"The  desire  of  the  moth  for  the  star, 

Of  the  night  for  the  morrow; 
The  devotion  to  something  afar 

From  the  sphere  of  our  sorrow." 

These  hungry  souls  of  to-day  our  church  needs.  She  needs  their  criticism. 
They  would  modify  her  theories,  change  her  organization,  revitalize  her  creeds. 
Let  her  continue  to  be  mainly  the  home  of  the  well-to-do  intellectually  and 
economically,  the  support  of  the  self-satisfied  part  of  the  community,  and  her 
doom,  temporarily  at  least,  is  sealed. 

Of  the  well-to-do  the  church  for  long  has  had  enough.     Her  danger  lies  in 


356 


THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 


the  loss  of,  perhaps  the  expulsion  of,  the  dissatisfied  from  her  fold.  Her  health 
and  stability,  her  continuance  and  development,  depend  on  her  ability  to 
assimilate  all  orders  and  classes  of  men.  Let  one  class  only  be  represented 
within  her  membership,  straightway  she  will  become  revolutionary,  and 
break  with  and  lose  what  is  precious  in  her  past.  On  the  other  hand,  let  these 
depart  and  the  others  only  remain,  and  her  message  is  only  an  echo  of  a  voice 
once  sounding  her  glory,  the  record  of  battles  long  ago  fought,  and  the  very 
bread  of  life  in  her  hand  has  become  green  and  mouldy.  A  reactionary 
church  is  worse  than  a  revolutionary  one. 

Yet  it  seems  to  me  our  duty  to-day  is  plain,  God's  voice  for  us  distinctly 
sounding.  However  difficult  and  unpopular  it  may  be,  the  message  of  the 
hour  is  the  proclamation  of  the  solidarity  of  mankind.  We  are  all  one 
in  Christ  Jesus,  one  in  aim  and  end  of  being.  We  can  only  attain  that  end 
in  the  understanding  of,  and  striving  for,  our  common  brotherhood.  God 
is  our  Father,  all  we  are  brethren — all  life's  strifes,  jars,  and  fitful  fevers  to 
the  contrary.  Our  true  unity  has  been  revealed  to  us  in  the  incarnation  of 
our  Lord  Christ,  and  slowly,  as  are  all  evolutionary  changes,  it  is  being 
wrought  out  in  us  by  the  spirit  of  Jesus. 

The  Church  of  Christ,  spite  of  all  her  limitations,  sins,  and  failures,  is  the 
only  earthly  witness  to  this  vast,  comprehensive  truth — the  solidarity  of 
mankind,  past,  present,  and  to  come,  and  for  that  truth  men  are  yearning. 
At  the  root  of  some  of  the  movements  that  seem  to  threaten  society  there 
are  aims  that  are  not  unworthy,  there  are  aspirations  that  are  true.  It  is  ours 
to  welcome  all  men  who  are  men  of  good  will;  ours  to  help  them  to  see  their 
high  calling  in  Christ  Jesus.  This  is  His  gospel.  It  is  not  a  creed;  it  is  a  life. 
It  is  inspiration,  heavenly  direction,  and  indestructible  reward. 

Men  are  sick  of  dogmatism,  religious  or  otherwise.  For  "  the  old  is  out  of 
date;  the  new  not  yet  born."  But  loving  deeds  are  potent  as  ever,  and  they 
who  do  them  are  God's  modern  angels,  bringing  "peace  on  earth,  to  men  of 
good  will." 

I  met  Doctor  Manning  first  when  I  took  a  mission  in  his 
church  in  Nashville,  Tennessee. 

Ridgefield,  Conn. 
Dear  Manning:  December  6,  1918. 

I  am  moved  to  write  to  you — you  may  disagree  with  what  I  say  very  com- 
pletely, but  for  old  times'  sake,  I  am  sure  you  will  read  it.  I  write  because 
most  evidently,  as  you  say,  you  have  had  a  fuller  light  on  God's  dealing  with 
us  all,  during  these  last  momentous  years.  You  have  come  closer  to  men, 
to  many  sorts  of  men  than  you  have  ever  done  before.  You  have  touched 
them  and  they  have  touched  you.  Your  life  and  ministry  are  surely  to  be 
the  richer  for  this  experience. 

Dear  Manning,  there  will  never  be  a  unity  of  "Faith  and  Order"  in  the 
ecclesiastical  sense  in  our  land  or  in  any  other.  With  the  widening  of  human 
knowledge  it  must  be  less  and  less  possible.  But  a  unity  of  purpose,  a  unity 
of  spirit,  a  unity  among  vast  bodies  of  people  united  as  we  have  found  our- 
selves for  a  real  cause  (a  cause  you  have  so  finely  stood  for),  that  there  may  be. 


THE  PROTESTANT  EPISCOPAL  CHURCH     357 

These  multitudes  have  lived  ordinary  lives.  They  have  made  few  reflec- 
tions on  the  great  issues  of  life  and  death.  To  claim  for  themselves  any 
unusual  religious  experience  would  be  far  from  their  dream — yet  what  they 
could  do  and  have  done  has  been  the  outcome  of  a  most  real  religious  feeling 
and  purpose,  unrecognized  by  us  and  by  they  themselves. 

They  have  learned  what  self-sacrifice  means.  They  have  proved  equal 
to  that  final  test  of  discipleship  which  the  Master  himself  demanded.  They 
have  gladly  risked  their  lives,  and  more  than  their  own  lives,  the  lives  of  their 
loved  ones,  for  distant  friends — half-known  friends. 

That  is  Christlike — that  is  Christian.  Such  long  ago  he  received  and 
blessed.  To  such  His  arms  are  open  to-day.  They  are  his  fellow-workers — 
of  such  is  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven. 

Go  to  these  followers  of  Jesus  in  any  of  the  armies — insist  on  any  creed 
or  ritual — talk  church  history  or  any  theory  of  the  contending  schools  to 
them — insist  on  their  acceptance  of  orthodoxy  as  to  Jesus'  nature — the 
problem  of  His  birth,  death,  resurrection !    You  talk  to  the  deaf. 

I  tell  you  we  have  to  give  men  Jesus:  Jesus  Himself  in  His  fine  life  and  pur- 
pose and  death,  and  not  theories  penned  about  Him  by  dear  dead  saints  and 
also  by  self-seeking  politicians.     Life  has  got  beyond  such  things. 

It  is  the  man  who  declared  men  were  brothers.  It  is  the  man  who  taught 
that  the  best  way  to  please  God  was  to  serve  men.  It  is  the  man  who,  living, 
spoke  the  truth,  and  willingly  died  to  back  what  he  lived  for. 

It  is  this  man,  this  whole  man,  men  want  and  will  follow.  He  ever  has, 
he  ever  will  appeal  to  and  inspire  men. 

Ecclesiastical  hair-splitting  must  seem  more  impossible,  mere  impertinence, 
in  the  face  of  such  a  life. 

For  want  of  unity  the  Allied  cause  came  to  the  very  brink  of  defeat. 

For  want  of  unity  the  churches  stand  inefficient  before  the  most  simple  and 
evident  problems  of  war  and  of  peace. 

As  organizations  they  were  totally  inefficient.  The  Red  Cross  and  the 
Y.  M.  C.  A.  took  on  their  job. 

For  want  of  unity  they  are  to-day  failing  to  accomplish  the  simplest,  most 
evident  duty  of  the  hour,  viz.,  give  some  simple  real  Christian  teaching  to  the 
youth  of  our  dear  land. 

What  teaching  is  there  to-day  in  our  schools  about  Jesus,  the  one  leader  of 
men? 

Our  lack  of  united  action  means  no  religious  teaching  to  the  young  of  our 
land.     A  crime  against  God  and  the  State. 

Get  together  and  outline  a  new  creed?  No,  no.  Twenty  years  hence  it 
would  satisfy  no  one.  But  the  life  of  Jesus  counteracting  materialism,  God 
in  human  nature,  standing  for  justice,  mercy,  peace,  and  reverencing  loving 
service — these  things  are  the  very  essence  of  Christianity,  and  the  only  stable 
foundation  of  democratic  government  as  well.  These  a  united  church 
could  preach,  and  the  land  would  listen. 

With  warm  greetings  and  good  wishes  to  Mrs.  Manning  and  the  child, 

Always  very  sincerely  yours, 
W.  S.  Rainsford. 

Dr.  W.  T.  Manning,  D.  D. 


358  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

The  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  is  to-day  making  proposals 
to  the  churches  looking  toward  unity.  Meanwhile,  in  none 
of  these  other  churches  are  there  such  bitter  divisions  as  in 
herself.  She  imports  into  her  family  quarrels  a  spirit  that 
makes  a  joke  of  unity  under  her  leadership.  If  she  her- 
self cannot  include  in  her  fold  men  who  do  not  see  alike,  no 
church  can.  But  partisanship  has  weakened  her.  The  extent 
to  which  the  clerical  partisan  will  go  amazes  the  layman.  Some- 
times he  seems  to  lack  not  only  all  grace  of  God,  but  the  in- 
stincts of  a  gentleman. 

A  peculiar  acrimony  attaches  itself  to  religious  debate.  In 
the  supposed  interests  of  God's  truth,  party  leaders  have 
stooped  to  methods  of  attack  at  least  as  unbrotherly  and  unfair 
as  those  we  have  grown  accustomed  to  expect  among  a  certain 
class  of  political  tricksters  who  make  no  professions  of  brother- 
hood. As  notice  of  this  is  forced  on  the  outside  world,  the 
very  word  priest  has  become  a  synonym  for  Jesuitry — as 
Jesuitry  has  become  an  equivalent  for  conduct  no  honest  man 
can  allow  himself. 

The  fresh  scandal  of  these  battles  breaks  out,  to  our  shame, 
again  and  again,  working  inexpressible  harm  to  the  "Cause." 
The  modern  clerical  combatant  often  wins  what  his  forebears 
won  in  olden  times,  honest  men's  contempt;  for  he  develops 
both  in  the  religious  press  and  in  debate  a  quality  of  malignant 
untruth,  an  intentional  aim  not  to  fight  fair.  The  party  call- 
ing itself  Catholic,  an  aggressive  and  insolent  party,  is  chiefly  re- 
sponsible for  the  state  of  things  I  refer  to. 

And  yet,  when  all  is  said,  so  long  as  man  is  man,  he  needs  and 
will  have  the  Church.  For  the  vastly  greater  part  of  us  must 
take  our  religious  beliefs,  just  as  we  take  all  our  other  beliefs, 
on  hearsay.  Few  have  time  or  mental  balance  or  learning  to 
take  them  any  other  way.  Opinions  on  history,  science, 
economics,  are  borrowed  by  nine  hundred  and  ninety-nine  out 
of  every  thousand.  The  sum  total  of  the  matter  is,  that  man  in 
the  mass  has  needed  and  will  need  some  church  to  tell  him  what 
to  believe. 

In  a  large  and  unconscious  way,  we  all  feel  this,  and  so  we 
go  to  the  church  of  our  fathers,  and  listen  to  its  liturgies  and 
lessons,  and  try  to  repeat  its  creeds.  We  honour  its  teachers, 
and  support  its  fabric,  just  as  long  as  we  can.     Then,  as  it 


THE  PROTESTANT  EPISCOPAL  CHURCH     359 

happened  before  to  other  men  in  other  times,  so  it  now  hap- 
pens to  us.  New  continents  of  truth  loom  out  of  the  mists. 
New  ideas  are  born.  History  begins  to  have  a  real  meaning. 
Even  economics  ceases  to  be  the  "dreary"  science,  for  it  has 
become  the  science  of  applied  brotherhood.  New  visions  and 
new  hopes  are  everywhere.  We  respond  to  them  and  welcome 
them.  Ah!  not  everywhere — not  in  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church.  Old  bottles  she  believes  in,  and  old  bottles  only,  and 
so  for  her  there  flows  no  new  wine. 

The  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  is  fast  on  the  way  to  become  a  small 
fantastic  sect;  getting  more  and  more  out  of  sympathy  with  the  great  life  of 
the  country.  Look  at  the  West!  See  what  our  church  means  there!  Well, 
the  work  will  be  done,  even  if  our  church  refuses  to  do  it.  But  what  a  chance 
we  had!"— "Phillips  Brooks,  Life  of"— by  A.  V.G.Allen,  Vol.  ii,  668. 


CHAPTER  XXIV 

The  Roman  Catholic  Church  in  the  City  of  New  York 

They  enslave  their  children's  children  who  make  compromise  with  sin. 

— Lowell. 

We  believed  in  1895  that  the  election  of  William  L.  Strong 
meant  the  beginning  of  a  new  and  better  era  in  the  life  of  New 
York  City,  and  it  did.  Many  reforming  elements  managed  to 
combine  (only  temporarily,  alas!)  to  elect  him,  and  I  did  what 
I  could  in  his  cause. 

The  one  thing  before  all  others  some  of  us  strove  for  in  that 
campaign  was  better  schools.  New  York  schools,  indeed  all 
charitable  institutions  supported  by  municipal  taxes,  were  in  a 
terrible  state.  There  were  no  proper  provisions  for  separating 
childish  offenders  against  the  law  from  older,  hardened  crimi- 
nals. Blackwell's  Island  was  a  disgrace  to  any  civilized  city. 
The  vastly  greater  proportion  of  those  employed  in  these  in- 
stitutions were  practically  appointees  of  the  house  at  the  corner 
of  50th  Street  and  Madison  Avenue,  the  residence  of  the  Roman 
Catholic  Archbishop  of  New  York. 

In  1 894  I  made  my  way,  as  I  often  did,  into  one  of  our  public 
schools  on  the  East  Side,  where  some  of  my  children  were  at- 
tendants. I  found  one  teacher,  a  young  woman,  in  permanent 
charge  of  seventy-five  children.  Their  ages  ranged  from  seven 
years  to  sixteen.  They  spoke  five  different  languages,  and 
only  eight  of  them  spoke  English. 

Very  briefly  I  must  restate  some  things  all  should  know,  but 
many  do  not  know,  about  religion  in  our  schools.  The  free 
schools  on  which  the  education  of  the  nation  depends  are  sup- 
ported by  state  and  municipal  taxes.  Education  is  a  govern- 
ment function.  Now  our  government  supports  no  church,  but 
protects  all  churches,  and  therefore  the  government  cannot 
teach  religion  in  the  schools,  if  by  religion  is  meant  the  dogmas, 
rites,  ceremonies,  and  catechisms  of  any  of  these  churches. 

360 


THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  IN  NEW  YORK    361 

It  is  not  so  long  ago  that  religious  teaching  meant  just  this 
sort  of  teaching  and  no  other.  This  old-fashioned  sort  of 
religious  teaching  has  quite  ceased  in  our  public  schools.  Of 
course,  in  denominational  church  schools  and  in  Sunday  Schools 
it  is  still  given. 

Now  children  must  have  religious  teaching.  They  will  not 
grow  to  worthy  citizenship  without  it.  They  cannot  get  it  from 
the  State.  They  do  not  get  it  from  their  parents.  Many 
parents  are  confused  and  ignorant.  I  am  speaking  of  con- 
scientious parents,  parents  who  themselves  were  brought  up  to 
church  beliefs.  Consequently,  millions  of  children  are  getting 
no  religious  teaching  at  all,  and  though  their  parents  see  the 
danger  of  this  state  of  things,  they  do  not  know  how  to  provide 
against  it. 

So  I  come  back  to  the  public  school  itself.  In  it  a  real  reli- 
gious teaching  should  be  provided.     How  can  this  be  done? 

The  religion  of  Jesus  means  (all  Christians  will  agree  to  this) 
before  all  else,  two  things:  First,  obedience  to,  reverence  for  the 
Truth — "  For  this  cause  was  I  born,  for  this  cause  came  I  into 
the  world,  to  bear  witness  to  the  Truth.  Every  one  that  is  of 
the  Truth  heareth  my  voice";  and  second,  a  life  of  self- 
sacrificing  service — "  If  any  man  will  come  after  Me,  let  him 
deny  himself  and  take  up  his  cross  and  follow  Me." 

He  who  lives  for  himself  alone  is  a  bad  man.  These  two  great 
truths  are  the  gist  of  the  teachings  of  Jesus.  These  two  great 
simple  things  are  the  bases  of  all  noble  living,  of  all  personal 
and  national  greatness.  Jesus  taught  them  and  died  for  them. 
Why  not  give  that  sort  of  religious  teaching  to  the  children  of 
all  nations  and  all  religions  assembling  in  our  national  schools? 

It  is  not  necessary  to  make  them  repeat  a  creed.  Plant  in 
their  young  lives  these  two  everlastingly  beautiful  truth  seeds, 
and  much  has  been  done  to  lay  deeply  a  foundation  for  a  love 
of  truth  and  of  beauty.  Something  done  toward  winning  for 
every  child  what  good  Bishop  Jeremy  Taylor  pleaded  for, 
almost  three  hundred  years  ago:  an  education  that  made  for 
"minds  apt  to  noble  choices  and  hearts  capable  of  mighty  love." 

Goodness  does  not  always  come  to  children  by  nature.  What 
goodness  most  of  us  have  has  been  won  by  hard  fights.  It 
is  a  crime  to  fail  to  lead  the  children  toward  goodness,  beauty, 
and  truth.     We  leave  them  money,  our  hard- won  money;  oh, 


362  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

let  us  be  sure  to  give  them  that  which  has  cost  us  far  more  than 
money,  the  Treasures  of  our  soul ! 

The  teachers  of  the  young  in  our  land  and  in  all  lands  are 
and  ever  have  been  men  and  women  much  above  the  moral  and 
spiritual  average  of  their  day.  The  New  York  school  teachers 
of  thirty  years  ago  were  not  nearly  so  well  equipped  for  their 
task  as  are  their  successors;  but  a  paralyzing  fear  greatly  limits 
the  efficiency  of  the  public  school  teacher  in  the  United  States 
— did  then  and  does  now:  that  fear  is  the  fear  of  teaching  any- 
thing that  any  small-minded  directing  authority  on  a  school 
board  may  choose  to  consider  "proselytizing."  The  inevitable 
result  of  this  state  of  things  is,  the  children  are  growing  up 
secularists. 

If  the  Protestant  churches,  divided  and  uncertain,  are  doing 
nothing  to  save  the  childhood  of  the  land  from  this  calamity, 
one  great  church  steps  forward  declaring  that  she  can  do  this 
great  work,  can  teach  the  child  a  needful  religion,  and  more, 
she  declares  that  she  has  exclusive  authority  to  do  so. 

To  criticize  any  church  that  seeks  to  give  religious  instruction 
to  the  young  is  an  ungracious  task;  and  since  I  feel  obliged  to 
do  so,  I  would  preface  my  criticism  by  stating  clearly  as  I, 
that  I  am  whole-heartedly  an  admirer  of  the  fine,  self-sacrificing 
faithfulness  of  the  Roman  Catholic  parish  priest  and  sub- 
ordinate clergy  in  our  own  and  in  other  lands.  Their  single- 
eyed  devotion  sets  to  all  other  churches  an  example  hard  to 
emulate  and  impossible  to  surpass.  They  spend  and  are  spent 
for  their  flock.  They  live  nearer  their  people  than  do  any  other 
clergy.  Here  celibacy  greatly  aids  them.  They  are  of  the  peo- 
ple, with  the  people,  for  the  people,  sharing  their  inmost  lives. 

But  this  beautiful  social  relation,  if  it  has  its  advantages, 
has  also  concomitantly  one  disadvantage.  Such  a  ministry 
is  apt  to  be  lacking  in  uplifting  quality.  Any  one  who  knows 
the  facts  of  Irish  life,  or  of  the  "Habitant"  life  of  Eastern  Can- 
ada, cannot  fail  to  note  this  loss.  I  might  illustrate  my  point 
from  conditions  in  other  lands,  but  I  confine  myself  to  the  case 
of  the  two  peoples  I  know  well.  Almost  exclusively  drawn 
from  the  peasant  class  to  which  they  minister,  the  Roman 
Catholic  clergy  in  these  countries  too  generally  set  their  faces 
as  resolutely  as  do  their  parishioners  against  all  social,  economic, 
and  political  reform.     The  priest  is  proud  of  the  docility  of  his 


THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  IN  NEW  YORK    363 

flock,  and  docile,  priest-worshipping  flocks  remain  impervious 
to  change. 

Gladly  admitting  so  much  that  is  admirable  in  the  great 
Roman  Catholic  Church,  I  must  go  on  to  speak  of  what  I  hold 
to  be  the  danger  to  the  Christian  religion  in  an  unreformed 
Catholicism.  If  Rome  should  change,  should  widen  her 
gospel  appeal  and  cast  from  her  all  fatuous  dreamings  of  tem- 
poral power,  then  might  the  unity  that  Jesus  foretold  become 
something  near.  But  now  I  must  face  facts  as  they  are,  and 
speak  of  them  as  I  saw  and  see  them.  The  Church  of  Rome 
has  a  record,  and  no  clerical  denials  can  wipe  it  out  or  alter  its 
significance. 

( 1 )  She  has  always  been  afraid  of  freedom. 

(2)  She  has  always  opposed  Democracy. 

The  multitude  forgets  this;  but  she  cannot  change,  for  the 
nature  of  her  claim  commits  her  inevitably  to  such  oppositions. 
The  Roman  Catholic  Church  claims  to  bring  to  men  the  only 
accredited  Truth  of  God.  To  the  casual  observer  she  is  only 
one  church  among  many.  Often  he  is  won  to  her  by  the  beauty 
of  her  ritual,  by  the  discipline  and  faithfulness  of  her  clergy, 
and  above  all  by  the  fact  that  in  these  days  of  confused  specu- 
lation, these  days  of  many  preachers  and  many  creeds,  she  alone 
offers  to  those  who  obey  her  certitude  and  peace. 

"Leave  doubts  behind  you  when  you  come  to  me.  Cast  fear 
away  when  you  kneel  at  my  altars.  /  know,  and  to  all  poor 
troubled  souls  I  offer  rest  in  the  Name  of  the  Father,  the  Son, 
and  the  Holy  Ghost." 

So,  seeking  peace,  millions  have  come  to  the  great  Roman 
Catholic  Church.  And  many  more  millions  are  coming;  for 
unquestionably  she  offers  the  highest  sort  of  religion  many  in 
man's  present  stage  of  social  and  religious  development  are  ca- 
pable of  understanding.  The  trouble  is  that  what  she  offers  is 
not  the  religion  of  Jesus,  and  it  is  not  true.  The  God  she  offers 
to  our  worship  is  not  a  good  enough  God  for  honest  and  in- 
telligent men  long  to  continue  worshipping.  He  is  a  God  who 
must  be  persuaded,  and  propitiated,  and  bought  off.  He  must 
have  intermediaries  in  heaven,  and  an  intermediary  on  earth. 
That  is  the  priest.  A  priest  to  confess  you,  a  priest  to  absolve 
you,  to  give  you  the  Eucharist,  and  feed  you,  to  teach  you  what 
to  believe,  how  to  live,  how  to  die.     And,  after  death,  a  whole 


364  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

system  of  priestly  go-betweens  to  watch  and  aid  your  suffering 
soul  toward  final  heaven. 

The  priest  and  all  his  ways  and  interferings  must  perish,  he 
and  his  God  together. 

For  ages  and  ages,  not  in  the  Roman  church  alone  but  in  all 
religions,  in  the  darkest  and  dimmest  of  them,  in  the  very  first 
poor  mumblings  of  the  half-animal  savage,  man's  instinct  has 
been  to  create  him  a  priest.  And  his  priest  has  turned  on  him 
and  fooled  him,  cheated  and  degraded  him.  So  much  is  history. 
In  other  forms  of  the  Christian  religion,  man  is  getting  rid  of 
the  priest.  The  trouble  with  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  is: 
she  cannot  be  herself  and  rid  her  of  the  priest.  For  Roman 
Catholicism  is  built  on  the  priest. 

To  claim  to  be  the  one  supreme,  accredited  mouthpiece  of 
God  to  men  is  a  terrible  claim  to  make.  It  is  the  declaration 
of  imperialism  in  religion.  Such  is  what  Roman  Catholicism 
and  its  Pope  stand  for.  Imperialism  was  once  an  effective  form 
of  human  government.  To-day  it  is  out  of  date,  and  so  blights 
mankind. 

Once  give  Rome  what  she  claims,  and  ever  and  always  she 
blocks  reform.  She  does  so  logically,  for  she  alone  knows  what 
reforms  there  should  be.  This  she  has  not  done  openly  here, 
for  she  is  but  one  church  among  many,  denied  the  autocratic 
power  that  she  assumes  and  always  must  assume  when  to  grasp 
it  was  possible.  Where  her  control  in  Ireland  is  undisputed, 
progress  ceases.  So  in  Eastern  Canada.  In  Paris,  during  the 
early  years  of  this  century,  I  met  those  great  Frenchmen  who 
saved  the  life  of  the  French  Republic.  From  them  directly 
I  learned  how  the  very  foundations  of  republican  government 
in  France  were  threatened  by  Rome's  most  astute  and  unscru- 
pulous politician,  Merry  Del  Val. 

Some  day  the  true  story  of  France's  then  struggle  with 
the  Vatican  will  be  told.  I  heard  both  sides  at  that  time.  I 
had  the  good  fortune  to  meet  some  of  the  great  priests  and 
bishops  of  France,  good  men,  torn  between  their  love  of  country 
and  obedience  to  the  Roman  See.  They  admitted  that  the 
Jesuits  (whose  acts  and  policies  they  were  unable  to  control) 
had  made  an  extensive  and  well-conducted  campaign  to  sub- 
vert the  children  in  the  many  schools  and  institutions  they  con- 
trolled from  Republicanism  to  the  white  Flag.   The  French 


THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  IN  NEW  YORK    365 

Government  was  aware  of  this  movement,  and  appealed  to  the 
bishops  of  France  to  stop  it.  The  Bishops  met,  and  made  en- 
gagements satisfactory  to  the  Government  of  the  Republic. 
The  matter  was  practically  settled,  when  imperative  orders 
from  Rome  bade  the  bishops,  one  and  all,  mind  their  own  busi- 
ness, and  let  the  Vatican  mind  hers.  The  Vatican  insisted  on 
dealing  directly  with  the  French  Government.  As  all  know 
now,  Merry  del  Val's  orders  were  defied  by  the  French  Govern- 
ment, but  as  Rome  had  a  wider  control  of  the  European  press 
than  had  the  then  somewhat  shaky  French  Republicans,  these 
were  published  to  the  world  as  the  atheistic  opponents  of  all 
religious  teaching  in  France. 

For  their  failure  to  support  the  Jesuitical  policy  of  the  Pope's 
Foreign  Secretary,  the  unfortunate  bishops  suffered  discipline, 
discipline  of  a  pitiful  and  a  spiteful  sort.  One  of  the  best- 
known  and  best-loved  bishops  in  France  himself  told  me,  as  he 
took  me  through  the  beautiful  Fourteenth-Century  palace  where 
he  had  been  wont  to  have  his  clergy  meet  with  him,  "I  cannot 
to-day  invite  my  clergy  to  drink  with  me  so  much  as  a  cup  of 
coffee  or  smoke  a  cigar." 

There  is  Roman  policy,  there  Roman  tyranny,  there  the 
working  of  the  temporal  power,  not  in  the  far  past,  but  in  our 
own  century,  when  a  puppet  Pope  allowed  a  bigoted  and  reac- 
tionary Spaniard  to  formulate  the  policy  of  the  Holy  See. 

It  was  a  lie  to  say  that  the  French  Republic  was  opposing  the 
teaching  of  religion.  No,  it  was  not  doing  so,  but  it  was,  for 
its  own  safety's  sake,  determined  to  drive  out  of  France  the 
great  organization  of  men  and  women  who  were  drawing  French 
money  to  teach  French  children  that  if  they  would  be  true  to 
God  they  must  pull  down  the  Republican  government  of 
France.  The  Jesuits  were  packed  out  of  France.  Many  of 
them  went  to  Spain.  Some  came  here,  and  had  not  the  French 
Government  acted  as  it  did,  France  could  never  have  presented 
to  the  German  onslaught  of  a  few  years  later  that  united  and 
heroic  defence  that  saved  the  world. 

I  am  not  writing  as  I  do  to  make  little  of  the  good  the  heroic 
Catholic  Church  has  done,  but  I  cannot  hide  from  myself  the 
fact  that  it  is  now,  in  some  ways,  a  practical  danger.  Con- 
vinced of  this  I  write  as  I  do.  If  she  would  reform,  if  she 
would  give  up  her  spiritual  imperialism,  if  she  would  admit,  as 


366  THE  STORY. OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

all  churches  must,  that  she  has  failed  and  sinned  in  the  past,  and 
is  unsure  of  many  things  in  the  present,  then,  indeed,  might  the 
lesser  and  younger  churches  gather  round  her  and  a  new  bright 
day  would  dawn  for  the  religion  of  the  Lord  Jesus  on  our  earth. 

As  it  is,  and  I  am  speaking  of  things  as  they  are,  stead- 
ily, persistently,  unscrupulously,  she  seeks  political  influence; 
and  she  is  consistent  and  logical  in  doing  so.  But  let  us  re- 
member that  if  she  succeeds,  so  far  as  success  is  hers,  democracy 
perishes.  She  crushes  her  opponents;  yes,  and  her  dutiful 
children  as  well,  when  they  attempt  to  oppose  even  her  locally 
expressed  will.  Right  here  in  New  York,  a  couple  of  years 
ago,  she  defeated  the  best  mayor  New  York  ever  had,  John 
Purroy  Mitchel,  because,  as  a  trustee  for  the  city,  he  held  him- 
self in  honour  bound  to  see  to  it  that  those  charities  in  New 
York  and  Brooklyn  and  the  Bronx  receiving  city  money  for  the 
support  of  city  children  should  be  honestly  and  efficiently  con- 
ducted. These  charities  had  evaded  the  city's  examination. 
Mitchel,  himself  a  loyal  Roman  Catholic,  named  a  capable 
and  unbiased  examining  committee.  Their  report  was  star- 
tling. Protestant  as  well  as  Catholic  institutions  had  made 
worse  than  poor  use  of  the  city's  trust  funds.  Shamefully 
filthy  conditions  were  brought  to  light.  There  was  neglect  of 
common  sanitary  measures;  inexcusable  filth;  lice  in  children's 
hair,  etc.,  etc.,  etc. 

Against  the  committee's  findings  the  Bishop  of  Long  Island 
made  a  most  untimely  protest.  That  was  bad  enough,  but 
the  Roman  Catholic  press  (in  large  part)  and  some  of  the  in- 
fluential priests  bitterly  and  semi-publicly  denounced  the 
Mayor  as  a  traitor,  and  the  weight  and  influence  of  his  own 
church  (and  it  was  great)  was  thrown  against  him  too  suc- 
cessfully when  he  sought  reelection  to  the  office  he  had  so 
honestly  and  so  brilliantly  filled. 

That  is  the  Roman  Church  in  New  York  to-day.  She  runs 
true  to  form.  It  is  folly  to  forget  it.  I  see  signs  of  a  new  and 
very  cleverly  suggested  Roman  propaganda  in  New  York. 
Rome  is  more  than  willing  that  those  timorous  wealthy  people 
who  see  dreadful  danger  from  socialism  on  the  political  horizon 
should  have  it  suggested  to  them  that  she  stands  ready  to  offer 
a  refuge  and  defence  against  any  and  all  of  the  "Red  threaten- 
ings"  of  the  land. 


THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  IN  NEW  YORK    367 

To  Capitalism,  always  timid,  Rome  suggests  alliance  and 
support.  The  editor  of  the  Wall  Street  Journal,  a  paper  claim- 
ing a  wider  circulation  than  any  other  financial  paper  in  the 
country,  lately  went  out  of  his  way  to  attack  two  of  the  best 
known  clergy  in  New  York  by  name,  because,  as  its  editor,  Mr. 
Hamilton,  asserted,  "they  offered  open  hospitality  to  enemies 
of  Christianity,"  and  then  goes  on  to  let  the  cat  out  of  the  bag 
by  adding:  "It  would  almost  seem  as  if  the  age-old  consistency 
of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  remained  as  the  nation's  last 
barrier  against  Bolshevism."1 

When  editorially  such  a  paper  dares  to  suggest  that  the 
stability  of  the  United  States,  financially  and  politically,  may 
depend  on  the  rule  of  a  church  that  demands  in  the  Name  of 
God  obedience  to  a  foreign  potentate,  the  Pope — obedience 
in  things  temporal  as  well  as  spiritual — surely  it  is  time  for  those 
who  still  believe  in  that  form  of  government  the  Fathers  es- 
tablished to  protest. 

Churches  that  claim  national  control  are,  and  always  have 
been,  reactionary.  Why  is  Russia  cursed  by  the  bloody 
tyranny  of  Bolshevism?  Because  a  corrupt,  ignorant,  and 
utterly  subservient  church  joined  hands  with  the  autocratic 
government  of  its  Czars,  first  to  debase,  and  then  to  betray,  the 
fatuously  faithful  millions  of  "Holy  Russia."  The  Czars 
supported  the  church.  The  church  put  the  Czar's  picture 
alongside  the  household  icon  in  every  peasant's  home,  bade 
the  faithful  kneel  to  both,  and  doomed  the  faithless  to  Siberia. 

As  I  said,  all  religious  imperialisms  are  alike.  When  Rome 
has  won,  she  has  benumbed  the  souls  of  men  as  did  the  Greek 
Church  in  Russia.  Religious  tyranny  is  worse  than  temporal 
tyranny,  for  it  is  tyranny  over  the  soul.  Where  populations 
yield  to  it,  certain  results  inevitably  appear.  In  Russia,  Spain, 
Italy,  Mexico,  or  Ireland  there  ensue  an  incapacity  for  orderly 
self-government,  an  inaptness  to  the  exercise  of  corporate 
freedom,  a  numbness  of  soul,  that  ever  have  doomed  such  peo- 
ple for  long  to  mental,  moral,  and  political  inferiority. 

So  much  is  history.  The  peoples  Rome  has  ruled  at  her  will, 
when  her  yoke  is  broken,  are  not  fit  to  be  free.  I  shall  be  ac- 
cused of  being  an  alarmist.  I  cannot  help  that.  I  speak  of 
what  I  see.     I  see  a  very  real  danger  from  Romanism  to  the 

Wall  Street  Journal,  March  25,  1921. 


368  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Christianity  of  our  land,  a  danger  that  the  careless  optimism  of 
the  Protestant  churches  ignores.  They  cannot  permit  that 
church  to  win  a  political  influence  which  would  enable  her  to 
spread  her  teachings  among  the  young  (in  schools,  reforma- 
tories, etc.,  etc.)  and  more  particularly  to  halt  in  her  quiet  but 
most  effective  way  any  effort  to  give  to  the  public  school  life 
of  the  United  States,  in  simple  form,  the  religion  of  Jesus.  If 
the  Protestant  bodies  would  act  together,  this  could  be  done. 

In  1890,  Charles  Stewart  Parnell  had  practically  won  for 
Ireland  that  modest  measure  of  Home  Rule  which  she  then  de- 
manded. The  stupidity  of  English  politicians  (they  can  be 
stupid),  the  extraordinary  narrow  vision,  morally,  of  Mr. 
Gladstone,  the  hypocrisy  of  the  non-conformist  conscience,  all 
united  with  a  folly  that  to-day,  to  us  looking  back,  seems  un- 
believable, to  defeat  Parnell.  But  well  Mr.  Parnell  knew  that 
the  defeat  of  Ireland's  cause  was  not  mainly  owing  to  these 
causes.  It  was  priestly  interference  that  defeated  him.  "The 
Irish  must  obey  their  bishops.  The  bishops  have  to  obey  Rome. 
That  is  why  the  whole  system  of  the  priests'  influence  in  politics 
is  so  infernal."1  No  truer  summing  up  is  possible.  To  forget 
this  is  folly. 

My  friend,  Dr.  Leighton  Parks,  lately  sounded  a  warning 
against  Roman  Catholic  political  influence  in  our  city's  life. 
He  was  answered  by  an  official  of  that  church,  in  the  New  York 
Times,  and  to  the  casual  reader  the  answer  would  seem  effective. 
Very  cleverly  Doctor  Parks's  antagonist  evaded  the  issue 
Doctor  Parks  had  raised.  I  quote  his  words:  "To  do  as  God 
commanded,  whatever  the  world  may  say  or  think,  is  to  be  free. 
Not  by  human  allowance,  but  under  the  approval  of  Him  whose 
service  is  perfect  freedom."  High-sounding  generalities,  but 
they  amount  to  nothing  at  all,  if  the  Roman  Church  is  the  one 
church  on  earth  authorized  by  God  to  tell  men  what  God  does 
command. 

What  clever  fooling  with  liberty  is  here?  One  is  reminded 
of  Macbeth: 

And  be  these  lying  fiends  no  more  believed, 
Who  palter  to  us  in  a  double  sense, 
Who  keep  the  word  of  promise  to  our  ear, 
And  break  it  to  our  hope. 


^'Life  of  C.  S.  Parnell,"  by  Mrs.  Parnell,  Vol.  II,  page  154 


THE  CATHOLIC  CHURCH  IN  NEW  YORK    369 

I  was  consulted  lately  by  a  doctor  friend  with  large  practice 
among  children.  He  told  me  of  a  lady  he  was  attending  who 
had  just  had  her  fifth  child.  He  found  her  recovery  retarded 
and  herself  in  a  state  of  mental  distress.  "  My  husband  is  a 
good  man,  but  he  is  a  Roman  Catholic,  and  one  terrible  thing 
clouds  my  life.  Even  before  I  am  able  to  get  up  and  go  out, 
at  the  fourteenth  day  they  take  my  babies  from  me  to  the 
church,  and  baptize  them.  And  from  that  day  forward  they 
teach  my  babies  that  they  must  not  believe  what  their  mother 
teaches  them  about  religion  and  God." 

I  have  written  at  length  on  this  ungrateful  subject  because  I 
felt  I  had  to.  And  as  I  end  I  would  say  that  I  think  I  can  see 
in  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  in  this  country  the  signs  of  a 
reforming  spirit  which  may,  I  hope,  go  far. 

Many  profoundly  religious  people  who  are  in  touch  with  all 
that  is  most  liberal  in  the  nation's  political  and  educational 
life  have  sought  peace  for  their  souls  with  her.  For  this  cause, 
in  days  of  religious  unrest,  they  have  bowed  to  her  spiritual 
authority.  But  they  are,  I  think,  increasingly  disinclined  to 
accept  from  her  any  other  authority.  May  not  this  lead  to 
a  liberalizing  of  American  Catholicism? 

In  closing  this  chapter,  critical  as  it  is  of  the  New  York 
Hierarchy,  I  would  remember  that  among  the  parish  priests 
of  the  city  there  have  been  and  there  are  many  noble  examples 
of  the  best  that  the  Church  has  given  to  the  world.  I  had  the 
honour  of  knowing  Father  McGlynn,  a  true  democrat,  a  lover 
of  the  poor,  and  one  of  God's  saints.  Never  was  a  greater 
honour  done  me  than  when,  by  request  of  his  people,  I  addressed 
them  after  his  death.  No  Roman  Catholic  prelate  in  New  York 
dared  to  do  so.  As  a  faithful  priest,  Father  McGlynn  put  the 
command  of  God  and  the  rights  of  men,  as  he  saw  them,  be- 
fore all  else.  And  to  the  shame  of  the  men  ruling  his  church,  he 
was  hounded  out  of  his  parish  because  he  protested  against 
unrighteous  discipline  which  would  have  tongue-tied  him.  I 
happen  to  know  that  when  he  died,  they  could  not  find  in  his 
denuded  wardrobe  a  suit  of  underclothing  to  bury  him  in.  All 
had  been  given  away. 

Father  McGlynn  was  a  saint,  a  crusader  born  ahead  of  his 
time.  He  and  Jacob  Riis  knew  the  poor  of  New  York,  and 
were  loved  by  them  more  than  any  other  men  in  my  time. 


CHAPTER  XXV 

Changes  of  Belief 

Christianity,  as  it  has  been  proclaimed  by  its  orthodox  and  accredited 
teachers,  can  no  longer  hope  to  win  world-wide  influence.  It  has  mani- 
fested to  all  thinking  men  its  incapacity. — Prof.  Josiah  Royce. 

Christian  morality  will  not  either  suddenly  or  gradually  conquer  the 
world.  But  if  Christianity,  conceived  in  its  true  spirit,  retains  its  hold 
upon  mankind,  humanity  will  go  on,  creating  new  forms  of  Christian 
morality. — Prof.  Josiah  Royce,  Hibbert  Journal,  1913- 

Any  one  reading  this  story  must  see  that  a  considerable  part 
of  it  has  to  do  with  those  inevitable  changes  of  belief  that  must 
come  to  everyone  who  believes  in  evolution.  I  have  changed 
radically  in  many  of  my  beliefs,  moral,  social,  and  religious, 
and  I  have  not  done  changing.  I  hope  to  go  on  changing  till 
I  die,  and  greatly  I  hope  and  long  to  go  on  changing  afterward. 

I  have  tried  to  write  with  frankness  about  those  changes.  I 
make  no  excuse  for  them.     They  were  healthy  and  inevitable. 

In  his  essay  on  Intellect,  Emerson  says: 

God  offers  to  every  mind  its  choice  between  truth  and  repose.  Take  which 
you  please;  you  cannot  have  both.  Between  these,  as  a  pendulum,  man 
oscillates.  He  in  whom  love  of  repose  predominates,  will  accept  the  first 
creed,  the  first  philosophy,  the  first  political  party  he  meets — most  likely  his 
father's.  He  gets  rest,  commodity,  and  reputation.  But  he  shuts  the  door 
of  truth. 

He  in  whom  the  love  of  truth  predominates  will  keep  himself  aloof  from  all 
moorings  and  float.  He  will  abstain  from  dogmatism,  and  recognize  all  the 
opposite  negations  between  which,  as  walls,  his  being  is  swung.  He  submits 
to  the  inconvenience  of  suspense  and  imperfect  opinion,  but  he  is  a  candidate 
for  truth,  as  the  other  is  not,  and  respects  the  highest  law  of  his  being. 

That  is  fine.  I  did  try  ever  to  be  a  "candidate  for  truth," 
as  Emerson  says.  My  earliest  convictions,  to  borrow  the  usual 
and  most  misleading  word,  were  first  the  unconsciously  bor- 
rowed opinions  of  others.     We  are  unconscious  borrowers  to 

370 


CHANGES  OF  BELIEF  371 

the  very  end,  but  in  early  days  we  are  more  immediately  im- 
pressionable. I  have  heard  a  tree  frog  calling  within  a  few  feet 
of  my  head,  yet  his  coloration  was  so  truly  that  of  the  delicate 
green  leaves  he  sat  among  that  for  long  I  searched  for  him  in 
vain.  He  was  part  of  his  environment.  So  is  any  healthy- 
minded  youth.  He  takes  his  colour  from  those  surroundings 
that  gave  him  life. 

This  is  specially  true  of  our  religious  beliefs.  Just  because 
they  are  the  realest,  deepest  part  of  us,  they  are  least  of  all  our 
own.  I  took  mine  as  I  took  the  clothes  my  mother  bought 
for  me — or,  as  in  my  mother's  case,  made  for  me — and  wore 
them  as  a  matter  of  course  and  without  question,  till  later  the 
suit  wore  out,  and  in  the  wider,  less  friendly  world  outside  the 
dear  home,  I  had  to  fit  me  with  other  clothes  as  best  I  might. 
Originality  is  not  for  us.  Who  shall  say  what  is  or  is  not  orig- 
inal to  him?  Thoughts  of  others,  wiser,  stronger,  enter  and 
reform  themselves  in  us.  Originality  is  as  rare,  as  potent,  and 
as  difficult  to  collect  as  radium. 

I  think  all  men  who  make  their  mark  pass  through  radical 
changes  of  belief.  I  do  not  mean  religious  belief  because,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  some  of  the  most  forceful  men  I  have  known 
have  succeeded  in  not  changing  their  religious  beliefs  one  iota, 
and  boasted  of  the  fact;  totally  ignorant,  of  course,  that  by  so 
boasting  they  were  directly  contradicting  the  very  essence  and 
spirit  of  the  Christianity  they  honestly  intended  to  champion. 

Some  of  those  I  have  intimately  known,  and  whose  religious 
life  was  real  and  living,  have  mistakenly  remained  silent  as 
to  its  changes  because  they  held  to  the  old  idea  that  a  man's 
religion  was  in  a  peculiar  sense  his  own  affair;  that  to  discuss  his 
religious  ideas  was  to  be  guilty  of  a  certain  degree  of  indelicacy. 
They  would  as  soon  have  discussed  the  details  of  their  "wills." 
How  this  false  though  commonly  received  concept  of  a  Chris- 
tian man's  duty  came  to  be  so  generally  accepted  I  have 
no  idea.  To  me  it  seems  peculiarly  and  inexcusably  false,  for 
it  is  nothing  less  than  the  thwarting  of  a  healthy  instinct  and 
the  denial  of  a  plain  duty. 

The  greater  the  question  confronting  us,  the  greater  the  need 
for  its  expression.  Waking,  dreaming,  rejoicing,  suffering, 
these  questions  of  the  soul  are  with  us  ever. 

Yes,  our  poor  little  visions  are  dear  to  us,  because  they  have 


372  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

cost  us  dearly,  and  when  we  are  obliged  to  give  them  up,  and 
change  them  for  others,  we  only  relinquish  them  with  sorrow 
and  bitter  pain.  This  I  know  to  be  true.  Why,  then,  when  a 
life's  story  is  told,  should  it  deal  with  a  man's  adventures  in 
every  field  of  endeavour  and  make  no  record  of  the  conflict  of 
his  very  soul?  What  is  God?  Is  there  anything  in  us  that 
shall  survive  death?  What  is  and  is  not  sin?  What  is  real 
righteousness?  What  does  the  life  of  Jesus  mean?  How  much 
of  our  record  of  it  is  true  ?  How  do  the  other  supermen  of  our 
race  stand  related  to  Him?  These  are  the  realest  and  most 
pressing  of  all  questions,  and  all  men  who  think  are  ever  de- 
bating them  inwardly.     Why  then  be  silent  as  to  that  debate? 

Change  and  renewal  are  our  law.  The  creeds  of  manhood 
are  no  more  the  creeds  of  boyhood  than  the  body  of  us  at  sixty, 
wounded,  scarred,  twisted,  with  many  an  adventure  and  many 
a  sin,  is  the  clean,  untried,  unwounded,  supple  thing  that  was 
ours  at  twenty-one.  Every  man  worth  listening  to  knows  this 
to  be  true.     Then  why  not  say  it  ? 

The  changes  in  my  own  teaching  and  preaching  were  not 
wrought  in  me  by  study  of  books,  though  of  course  I  tried  to 
read  of  the  best,  but  rather  were  the  result  of  what  I  saw  and 
felt  in  the  world  life  around  me.  In  my  very  early  life,  as  I 
have  said  before,  I  was  very  much  alone.  I  daresay  this  was 
my  own  fault,  but  be  that  as  it  may,  I  never  got  any  help  from 
any  living  voice  that  I  can  remember  in  England.  Robertson 
and  Mazzini  I  fed  on,  and  they  were  good  food.  During  my 
life  as  a  missioner  I  did  not  grow  intellectually.  I  gained  ex- 
perience of  men  and  of  the  country.  But  I  was  a  popular 
preacher  only,  delivering  popular  discourses;  doing  good  be- 
cause I  was  not  working  for  myself.  But  I  made  little  spiritual 
headway. 

In  Toronto  I  found  a  firmer  foothold  for  my  faith.  I  found  a 
larger  and  lovelier  God.  Of  this  I  have  told  in  the  chapter  on 
Toronto. 

In  New  York,  the  difficulty  of  the  task  I  had  set  myself  to 
accomplish,  and  the  novelty  of  it,  served  to  shield  me  during 
those  first  years  from  clerical  criticism.  But  it  was  inevitable 
that  as  it  came  to  be  understood,  the  radical  nature  of  the 
doctrine  taught  in  St.  George's  should  draw  fire;  and  for  many 
years  I  was  pretty  close  to  a  heresy  trial  at  any  time. 


CHANGES  OF  BELIEF  373 

You  must  remember  that  in  the  'oo's  some  of  the  best  men 
in  the  land  were  flung  out  of  the  churches.  Bishop  Gore,  then 
of  Birmingham,  England,  unfrocked  a  good  man,  turned  him 
out  of  his  parish  and  out  of  the  Anglican  Church  without  a 
trial,  not  because  he  could  not  say  the  creed,  but  because  he 
could  not  accept  the  Bishop's  interpretation  of  it.  One  of  the 
best  men  I  ever  knew,  Algernon  Crapsey,  of  Rochester,  was  un- 
frocked by  the  Bishop  of  Western  New  York.  So  were  several 
other  good  men  in  other  dioceses,  and  in  most  instances  these 
suffered  expulsion  because  they  were  thought  to  be  unsound  on 
the  doctrine  of  the  Virgin  birth.  On  that  doctrine  I  was  as 
unsound  and  as  outspoken  as  any  of  them. 

I  will  digress  a  little  here,  and  briefly  outline  my  own  way 
of  approach  to  what  I  believed  and  taught  about  this  much- 
disputed  doctrine,  as  I  find  it  in  a  sermon  of  mine,  preached  at 
the  time.  "As  belief  in  the  spiritual  power  and  miracle-working 
power  of  Jesus  spread,  as  his  unique  goodness  and  greatness 
came  to  be  accepted,  his  followers  very  naturally  came 
to  think  of  him  as  conceived  and  born  as  was  no  common 
man.  He  was  without  sin.  How  could  this  be  possible  if  he 
came  into  the  world  as  sinful  men  come?  So  round  this  nat- 
ural idea  first  myth  and  legend  gathered,  and  finally  the  hard- 
and-fast  dogma  came  to  be  demanded,  under  pain  of  persecu- 
tion by  the  faithful." 

Thus  the  true  concept,  the  real  significance  of  the  Incarnation 
was  replaced  by  barren  scholasticism.  And  mark  the  result! 
The  real  Jesus,  so  understanding,  so  approachable,  so  really 
revealing  man's  nature  and  God's,  was  no  longer  so  approach- 
able. He  must  be  aided,  supplemented,  in  his  mediating  work, 
by  a  host  of  other  intermediaries,  beginning  with  the  Virgin  his 
mother,  and  running  away  into  a  host  of  insignificant  saints. 

We  all  of  us  inherit,  as  is  not  wonderful,  the  results  of  this 
materialistic  spirit  of  past  time.  Orthodoxy  has,  as  is  usual, 
made  the  truth  of  God  semi-ridiculous  with  its  traditionalism. 
Jesus  was  realest  of  the  real.  He  shared  the  beliefs  of  his  time. 
He  believed- in  the  nearness  of  the  parousia — as  did  Paul — and 
was  mistaken.  He  was  under  all  the  conditions  not  only  of 
humanity  but  of  the  humanity  of  his  time  and  place.  So  much 
was  essential  to  a  true  incarnation.  Incarnation  meant  condi- 
tions.    He  did  not  know  any  more  about  philosophy  or  philol- 


374  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

ogy,  about  history  or  natural  laws,  than  did  any  Jew  about 
Him,  except  in  so  far  as  a  pure  heart  helps  knowledge. 

The  more  convincedly  we  believe  in  the  incarnation,  the  more 
strongly  must  we  hold  to  the  conditions  and  limitations  of  it; 
without  them  the  Incarnation  is  not  real.  Where,  then,  is  the 
Divineness?  It  is  in  the  perfection  of  his  obedience,  and  the 
resulting  absoluteness  of  his  moral  and  spiritual  verdicts. 

Inside  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  things  looked  stormy. 
I  needed  the  help  and  guidance  of  someone  older,  wiser,  and 
more  experienced  than  I.  Such  an  one  I  found  in  Dr.  T.  T. 
Munger,  of  New  Haven,  and  to  him  I  owe  a  great  debt.  His 
book,  "The  Freedom  of  Faith,"  helped  me  greatly;  more  than 
any  book  I  had  read  for  years.  But  he  was  more  than  his  books, 
admirable  as  they  were.  I  found  in  him  a  sympathetic  friend, 
a  man  wise  in  council  as  he  was  clear  in  vision.  In  person  and 
by  letter,  when  I  was  in  a  difficult  place,  I  consulted  him,  and 
what  he  advised  my  doing  or  saying,  I  did  and  said. 

He  carried  his  learning  lightly,  and  had  a  way  of  putting  him- 
self at  your  service  that  was  all  his  own.  There  was  a  gentle 
graciousness  about  him  rarely  winning.  There  may  have  been 
others  like  T.  T.  Munger  in  those  days,  but  I  doubt  it.  I  never 
knew  any  clergyman,  in  any  church,  on  either  side  of  the 
Atlantic,  that  seemed  to  me  as  wise  and  holy  a  man  as  he.  He 
was  a  great  heretic  and  a  great  Christian. 

I  am  quoting  at  some  length  a  letter  he  wrote  to  me,  an- 
swering the  despairing  cry  of  a  friend  of  mine.  This  man  was 
off  with  the  old  and  had  not  found  the  new.  Nothing  in  Doc- 
tor Munger 's  books  goes  deeper,  is  finer  or  more  helpful.  No 
answer  I  could  make  then  or  now  to  this  so  common  need  of 
good  men  is  as  valuable.     So  I  quote  the  letter  at  some  length. 


It  is  evening,  and  I  hope  I  shall  not  be  interrupted  until  I  have  at  least 
tried  to  tell  you  what  I  think  of  your  friend's  letter.  I  have  read  it  three 
times,  and  have  tried  to  read  between  the  lines.  All  the  ordinary  symptoms 
are  present,  but  in  rather  unusual  force:  the  prognosis  is  favourable  unless 
the  patient  loses  courage  or  acts  rashly — sinks  into  despair  or  jumps  out  of 
the  window.  The  latter  is  the  greatest  danger.  I  am  not  treating  the  sub- 
ject lightly. 

Do  we  not,  do  not  all  earnest  souls  who  come  into  freedom,  know  just  what 
your  friend  is  passing  through?  I  mean  exactly  what  I  say,  when  I  say  that 
he  seems  to  me  to  be  undergoing  the  pains  of  spiritual  birth.     He  is  coming 


CHANGES  OF  BELIEF  375 

out  of  the  world  of  traditionalism  and  formalism  and  intellectualism,  and  is 
feeling  his  way  into  the  world  of  the  spirit. 

We  all  begin  our  ministry,  and  our  religious  life  as  well,  under  a  great  load 
of  traditional  and  formal  doctrines.  It  is  necessarily  so;  it  is  the  school  mas- 
ter era  in  life.  Many  never  get  beyond  it.  Some  partially  escape  it.  A  few 
are  called  and  ordained  to  pass  through  it,  and  reach  the  stage  of  realities. 

So  far  as  I  can  read  your  friend's  mind,  he  is  throwing  off  the  material 
forms  of  truth,  and,  if  he  but  knew  it,  has  come  to  the  borders  of  the  spiritual 
world.  He  calls  it  "facing  an  abyss."  He  is  mistaken;  he  has  come  out  of 
one  world  and  his  eyes  are  not  used  to  the  light  of  the  other.  St.  Paul  hit  the 
matter  exactly  when  he  said  that  "  henceforth  he  knew  Christ  no  more  after 
the  flesh."     Christ  became  a  spiritual  fact  and  force  to  him. 

I  verily  believe  that  in  his  higher  and  more  spiritual  moods,  the  outward 
forms  of  Christ's  life  vanished  and  the  spiritual  realities  and  verities  that  lay 
behind  the  forms  became  the  only  things  he  regarded.  It  is  not  a  new  ex- 
perience, but  it  is  repeated  in  every  man  who  finds  himself.  Now  the  trouble 
with  your  friend  is  that  the  higher  criticism,  natural  science,  and  his  own 
thought,  have  together  broken  up  his  old  world  and  swept  away  his  former 
beliefs,  and  he  therefore  thinks  he  is  on  the  borders  of  the  abyss.  But  at 
the  same  time  he  says  he  is  willing  to  be  alone  with  God.  Where  could  he 
better  be? 

And  here  I  would  beg  a  special  attention  to  what  this  wise 
and  deeply  taught  teacher  adds: 

For  my  part,  I  do  not  care  how  much  the  higher  criticism  and  science 
sweep  away.  I  believe  the  whole  process  is  in  the  order  of  evolution.  It  is  a 
destruction  of  the  formal  and  an  introduction  into  the  spiritual  which  is  the 
goal  of  man. 

I  believe  that  just  as  science  and  criticism  and  thought  take  away  from 
us  what  we  have  deemed  the  supports  of  our  faith,  will  spiritual  facts  and 
truths  and  laws  come  to  us.  And  they  come,  as  to  your  friend,  through 
darkness  and  struggle  at  first.     .     .     . 

What  we  all  need  is  to  understand  our  day,  and  what  is  going  on  in  it. 
That  it  is  the  beginning  of  the  transfer  of  faith  from  forms  to  realities.  I  think  the 
forms  are  necessary ',  but  always  in  a  lessening  degree.  The  power  by  whish  we 
are  carried  from  one  to  the  other  is  the  truth.  This  truth  makes  us  free.  What 
I  cannot  understand  in  your  friend's  state  of  mind  is  his  unhappiness  over  his 
loneliness.  The  truth  can  work  no  harm  to  any  one.  If  Harnack  upsets  the 
Apostles'  Creed,  what  of  it?  If  untrue,  it  ought  to  be  upset;  the  air  is  so 
much  clearer. 

I  can  see  no  rational  thing  to  do  but  to  trust  the  universe — that  is  God — and 
trust  and  rejoice  in  Him.  A  man  should  smite  himself  and  pull  himself  to- 
gether, when  he  finds  himself  growing  timid  and  anxious. 

More  and  more  do  I  think  that  Christ  looked  at  things  as  they  are.  This 
is  natural  and  intellectual  and  high.  To  shove  everything  over  into  the  end- 
less future  is  not  intellectual,  nor  high,  nor  spiritual.     .     .     . 


376  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

I  quote  from  this  letter  of  my  dear  teacher  and  friend,  italiciz- 
ing words  and  sentences  that  he  underlined,  knowing  well  that  he 
would  have  approved  of  my  doing  so.  Doctor  Munger  wrote 
hastily,  after  a  long  day's  work  and  late  at  night.  But  nothing 
within  the  covers  of  my  book  has,  to  my  thinking,  a  higher 
spiritual  value.  I  had  forgotten  this  letter  of  Doctor  Munger's, 
and  now,  on  reading  it  again,  I  think  it  had  far  more  effect 
on  my  own  thinking  than  I  knew  at  the  time. 

It  is  a  profound  satisfaction  to  me  that  perhaps  unwittingly, 
but  none  the  less  really,  I  had,  in  stumbling,  fumbling  way, 
managed  to  get  where  he  had  got;  managed  to  see  that  the 
only  way  to  get  near  the  God  of  Truth  was  to  look  straight  at 
things  as  they  are,  and  so  find  in  the  universe  as  it  is  the  only 
knowledge  of  God  as  He  is,  the  only  knowledge  that  we  poor 
gazers  through  dark  glasses  can  gain  at  all.  The  deluding  day 
of  belief  in  the  supernatural  is  past.  In  it  man  worshipped  the 
changeful  God  of  his  fancy  and  his  dream,  and  some  truth  there 
ever  was  in  his  fancies  and  his  dreams.  But  as  the  fields  of 
reality  slowly  open  their  wonders  to  man's  searching,  fancies 
and  dreams  take  their  truer  subordinate  place.  It  may  be 
hard  to  give  up  our  fancies  and  dreams  about  Jesus,  but  do  it 
we  must.  By  so  much  as  Jesus  is  pronounced  to  be  supernatural, 
by  His  birth,  or  death,  or  rising  from  the  dead,  by  so  much  are 
we  robbed  of  our  elder  Brother,  robbed  of  a  real  son  of  man  who 
is  a  real  practical  guide  and  example;  one  we  can  follow  and 
imitate  down  here  on  earth. 

The  reason  for  belief  that  Jesus  was  supernatural  lies  in  the 
deep  human  longings  common  to  us  all.  We  would  find  some- 
where, somehow,  an  inerrant  authority,  an  authority  speaking 
with  unmistakable  clearness  on  those  deep  questions  our  un- 
satisfied hearts  are  forever  propounding.  Such  a  mode  of 
self-revelation  does  not  consort  with  a  God  of  things  as  they 
are,  and  more — it  does  not  agree  with  the  picture  of  Jesus  given 
us  in  the  New  Testament.  Jesus  himself  refused  to  occupy  any 
such  place.  He  did  not  claim  oracular  knowledge  then,  and  it 
is  a  vast  mistake  to  ascribe  it  to  Him  now. 

What  He  did  claim  was  that  the  spirit  of  his  Father  God, 
which  had  enabled  and  inspired  Him,  would  continue  to  lead 
into  new  truth  those  who  followed  Him  while  He  lived  on  earth, 
and  that  when  He  lived  on  earth  no  longer,  the  guilding  of  God 


CHANGES  OF  BELIEF  377 

would  be  given  to  those  who  continued  to  seek  for  and  obey  the 
Truth.  Science  will  appeal  to  truth  seekers  as  long  as  men 
have  brains,  and  the  Religion  of  Jesus  as  long  as  they  have 
hearts. 

Yes,  the  God  of  the  supernatural1  must  fade,  replaced  by 
the  God  of  things  as  they  are. 

This  profoundly  important  change  in  our  idea  of  God  neces- 
sitates, of  course,  change  in  each  and  all  of  our  conceptions  of 
our  relations  to  Him.  Churches,  creeds,  dogmas,  Bibles,  all 
remain.  All  had  and  have  their  uses,  but  none  of  them  can 
rightfully  call  on  any  man  for  an  absolutely  authoritative  obe- 
dience. For  man's  religious  beliefs  are  as  truly  and  directly 
an  evolution  as  is  his  body.  Many  good  people  fancy  that 
they  worship  the  God  of  Abraham,  Isaac,  and  Jacob,  but  they 
do  not.  The  Jews  regarded  themselves  as  the  favourites  of 
their  semi-heathen  God  Jehovah.  They  made  him  say: 
"Jacob  have  I  loved;  Esau  have  I  hated."  The  modern  boy 
reading  the  story  of  Jacob  and  Esau  is  sure  to  register  his  first 
protest  against  Jewish  orthodoxy  and  verbal  inspiration.  As 
between  Jacob  and  Esau,  he  profoundly  disagrees  with  Jehovah, 
and  the  modern  boy's  opinion  is  the  result  of  man's  moral  evolu- 
tion upward,  and  is  altogether  right. 

Puritan  evangelicalism  did  a  great  and  good  work.  Per- 
haps it  made  our  own  type  of  Anglo-Saxon  democracy  possible; 
but  it  proclaimed  a  divine  partiality  that  is  now  unthinkable. 

It  is  time  to  face  the  truth  about  ourselves  and  God.  Look- 
ing round  us,  steadily  looking,  it  is  a  hard  thing  to  believe 
in  God  at  all.  A  god  whose  chief  or  sole  revelation  of  himself 
is  made  in  nature  can  no  longer  satisfy  the  craving  of  man's 
soul  for  righteousness.  He  is  not  worshipful.  Nature  is 
brutally  partial.  She  sides  with  the  strong  and  crushes  the 
weak,  and  the  strength  she  approves  is  no  criterion  of  moral 
excellence. 

But  a  few  years  ago  we  knew  little  about  Nature  and  her 
ways.  Of  her  gross  cruelty,  her  dreadful  wastefulness,  men  had 
not  taken  note.  An  illustration  of  this  in  literature  is  Words- 
worth's poetry.  The  nature  god  he  worships  is  wholly  the 
deity  of  his  own  dream.     He  does  not  actually  know  that  the 

'I  use  the  word  in  its  commonly  accepted  sense — i.  e.,  interference  with  the  established  order 
of  nature. 


378  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

scenes  which  enchant  him  by  their  loveliness,  the  sunset  glory 
that  bids  him  kneel,  are  what  man  brings  to  nature,  are  a  crea- 
tion of  his  own.  It  is  man's  eye  that  lends  colour  to  the  rain- 
bow, and  sees  in  the  pageantry  of  the  sunset  a  fitting  garniture 
for  God.  Yes,  you  come  back  to  man  as  the  only  justification 
and  explanation  of  nature,  and  God  as  the  justification  and  ex- 
planation of  man.  For  myself  I  would  say  the  only  way  I 
know  of  loving  God  is  loving  men. 

I  have  fought  a  good  fight,  I  have  finished  the  course,  I  have  kept  the 
faith.  Henceforth  there  is  laid  up  for  me  a  crown  of  righteousness,  which  the 
Lord,  the  righteous  judge,  shall  give  me  at  that  day;  and  not  to  me  only,  but 
to  all  them  that  love  his  appearing.     (2  Tim.  iv,  7-8.) 

So  wrote  Paul,  about  A.  D.  70.  Here  a  hero  sings  his  death 
song.  Its  numbers  thrill  us  still,  but  it  is  frankly  egotistic.  So 
was  the  early  Christian  faith.  The  Christian  martyr  often 
sought  death,  even  so  late  as  in  the  Twelfth  Century.  The 
brave  Albigenses  could  scarcely  be  kept  back  from  the  flame. 
They  longed  for  martyrdom.  So  much  their  very  extermina- 
tors tell  us.  There  shone  before  them  the  victor's  crown,  and 
an  immediate  entrance  into  the  city  of  the  Great  King.  All 
their  powers  of  mind  and  heart  and  will  were  set  on  winning  a 
personal  immortality. 

Could  the  men  of  those  and  still  earlier  days  have  made  the 
fight  they  made  (and  it  was  for  us  their  descendants  they  made 
it),  had  they  been  inspired  by  a  less  certain,  less  egotistic 
vision?  Surely  they  could  not.  They  had  the  bread  they 
needed;  strength  and  vision  adapted  to  their  own  need  and 
time.  But  on  their  bread  we  cannot  march  to-day.  Their 
vision  is  not  ours.  Try  as  we  may  to  catch  at  and  hold  their 
great  dream,  its  exclusively  personal  quality  moves  us  not. 
Even  while  we  wonder  at  their  courage,  we  cannot  blind  our 
eyes  to  the  true  and  necessary  things  that  their  vision  failed 
to  show  them. 

They  were  not  merciful  or  pitiful  or  loving  to  their  fellow-men. 
High  as  was  at  times  their  sense  of  obligation  to  one  another — 
to  the  faithful,  the  chosen,  the  elect — for  outsiders,  for  unbe- 
lievers they  cared  little  or  not  at  all.  The  saints,  confessors, 
martyrs,  lived,  stood,  fought,  and  died  together.  To  them  the 
sacred  group  was  all  in  all.     For  the  mass  of  humanity  they  had 


CHANGES  OF  BELIEF  379 

no  love  or  sympathy.  Hate  was  repaid  with  hate,  and  scorn 
with  scorn.  They  suffered  torture  gladly,  and  were  quite  will- 
ing in  their  hour  of  power  to  inflict  on  their  enemies  what  their 
enemies  inflicted  on  them.  There  was  little  in  them  of  the 
spirit  of  brotherhood  as  we  find  it  in  Jesus:  that  high  and  holy 
spirit  which  comes  but  slowly  to  men.  Of  this,  it  is  but  simple 
truth  to  say,  the  world  has  more,  far  more,  in  this  Twentieth 
Century,  than  it  had  in  the  first. 

In  one  of  the  quotations  with  which  I  have  headed  this 
chapter,  Josiah  Royce,  whom  some  good  judges  believe  to  have 
been  the  greatest  philosopher  of  our  generation,  with  courage 
and  candour  says:  "Christian  morality  will  not  either  suddenly 
or  gradually  conquer  the  world."  His  hope  is  that  "Humanity 
will  go  on  creating  new  forms  of  Christian  morality."  Surely 
that  is  just  what  we  are  doing;  just  what  Jesus  foretold  we 
should  do.  Royce  says:  "These  new  forms  of  morality  must 
be  conceived  in  Christ's  true  spirit."  I  think  that  there  are 
abundant  signs  that  gradually  they  are  so  being  conceived. 

As  to  belief  in  personal  immortality,  for  instance,  Dostoi- 
evsky, a  social  reformer  and  a  genius,  with  that  frankness  and 
clarity  with  which  the  modern  Russian  spirit  is  endowed,  states 
for  himself  and  for  the  masses  of  the  Greek  and  Catholic 
churches,  the  common  orthodox  forms  of  belief  in  immortality 
and  the  grounds  for  that  belief. 

Surely  I  have  not  suffered,  that  my  crimes  and  struggles  may  but  manure 
the  soil,  for  the  future  harmony  of  somebody  else.  ...  I  want  to  be 
there  when  everyone  suddenly  understands  what  it  has  all  been  for.  .  .  . 
All  the  religions  of  the  world  are  built  on  this  longing,  and  I  am  a  believer. 

So  much  is  true.  Uncounted  millions  have  lived  and  died 
nobly  holding  it  fast,  but  it  is  frankly  the  faith  of  the  religious 
egoist.  There  are  some  who  have  reached  a  faith  greatly 
higher  than  Dostoievsky's,  and  it  is  to  the  teachings  of  Jesus 
they  feel  that  they  owe  that  higher  faith. 

As  the  Master's  words  have  been  handed  down,  inevitably 
tinged  by  the  beliefs  of  His  and  succeeding  times,  a  heaven  of 
personal  reward  for  believing  souls  is  promised.  So  much  is 
certain.  But  it  is  no  less  certain  that  Jesus  Himself  widened 
His  message  even  in  the  short  space  during  which  He  taught. 
The  message  He  delivered  was  primarily  one  to  His  own  time. 


380  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

It  was  wholly  impossible  for  His  disciples,  perhaps  for  Jesus 
Himself,  to  tear  from  heart  and  mind  the  idea  of  a  Rewarding 
God.  Even  the  best  of  men  could  not  then  have  set  their  faces 
toward  the  lonely  wilderness  path  that  must  be  trodden  by  one 
and  all  of  them,  if  they  entertained  a  doubt  of  their  final  public 
and  personal  vindication  before  the  throne  of  their  all-ruling 
Master.  So  they  faced  unflinchingly  what  lay  before  them, 
because.they  "reckoned  that  the  sufferings  of  this  present  time 
were  not  worthy  to  be  compared  with  the  glory  which  should 
be  revealed  in  them."  They  had  their  own  task,  and  they  had 
to  feed  and  fortify  them  for  it,  the  daily  bread  they  needed. 
Our  task  is  not  theirs;  ours  is  an  easier,  if  perhaps  quite  as  dan- 
gerous a  road.  Our  religion  has  not  brought  us  imminent  peril 
of  death.  We  are  not  counted  as  public  pariahs,  "the  off- 
scouring  of  all  men  for  the  sake  of  Jesus." 

These  things,  if  we  remember  them,  will  help  to  explain  to  us 
how  it  comes  about  that  a  faith  which,  in  their  case,  was  as- 
sured of  an  unspeakably  glorious  personal  hereafter,  has,  in  our 
day,  shrunk  to  a  sort  of  hopeful  orthodox  complacency  that, 
after  this  life  is  done  with,  we  may  expect  an  even  better  time 
in  the  next.  This  and  nothing  higher  is  the  faith  of  millions 
to-day. 

I  cannot  see  in  this  later  popular  form  of  orthodox  belief 
in  immortality  much  that  is  truly  akin  to  the  spirit  of  Him  who 
steadily  faced  His  cross.' 

It  is  a  long  way  from  St.  Paul  to  Huxley,  yet  in  a  real  sense 
both  followed  the  same  Master,  for  both  might  have  worthily 
worn  the  shining  armour  of  Mr.  Valiant  or  Truth.  Ultra-mod- 
ernism in  Huxley  did  not  quench  in  him  the  human  yearning 
that  so  mightily  wrought  in  St.  Paul.  In  1883,  Huxley  wrote 
to  John  Morley:  "It  is  a  curious  thing  that  I  find  my  dislike  to 
the  thought  of  extinction  increasing  as  I  grow  older  and  nearer 
the  goal.  It  flashes  across  me  at  times  with  a  sort  of  horror 
that,  in  1900,  I  shall  probably  know  no  more  of  what  is  going 
on  than  I  did  in  1800." 

Morley  answers  that  he  was  "not  plagued  that  way."  But 
many  of  us  are  plagued  just  that  way.  And  because  ortho- 
doxy's reply  to  the  cry  of  the  hungry  for  life  beyond  the  grave 
is  inadequate  (and  when  I  use  that  word  I  use  the  mildest  word 
possible,  for  to  listen  to  the  usual  Easter  sermon  is  enough  to 


CHANGES  OF  BELIEF  381 

make  any  man  doubt  the  Resurrection),  men  are  turning  to 
man  himself,  and  from  the  "abysmal  depths  of  his  personality" 
are  seeking  to  draw  forth  proof  that  he  must  survive  the  grave. 
Such  searching  is  natural — we  cannot  rebuke  it — but  to  me  it 
seems  the  treading  of  a  backward  path. 

What  answer  the  future  may  yield  us,  who  can  tell?  But 
I  find  myself,  as  I  grow  older,  sharing  Huxley's  experience,  or 
as  Young,  in  his  "Night  Thoughts,"  puts  it: 

Our  wishes  lengthen  as  our  sun  declines. 

I  greatly,  increasingly,  long  to  "go  on  and  still  to  be."  The 
longing  for  life,  greater  and  more  abundant  than  I  have  known 
or  can  know  here,  increases.  I  cannot  satisfy  myself,  however, 
that  this  soul  passion  for  immortality  is  a  wholly  religious  and 
unselfish  thing,  or  that  it  must  of  necessity  win  the  sort  of 
satisfaction  it  demands,  in  a  universe  back  of  which  is  justice 
and  right.  Nothing  so  clearly  proves  to  me  the  unconquerable 
religiousness  of  our  human  nature  as  does  the  growth  within  us 
all  of  the  spirit  of  unselfishness  which  is  the  spirit  of  Jesus.  To 
me  it  is  quite  certain  that  every  great  testing  time  that  comes 
to  us  proves  that  our  acts  are  less  marked  by  selfishness  and 
self-seeking  than  were  those  of  our  fathers.  A  personal  salva- 
tion is  no  longer  a  righteous  and  legitimate  aim. 

Rewards  offered  to  us  for  holiness  achieved  pall  on  us.  We 
see,  if  we  look  squarely  at  life,  men  and  women  everywhere, 
outside  religious  organizations  quite  as  commonly  as  within 
them,  gladly  giving  their  lives  to  advance  the  cause  of  truth, 
or  to  better  the  condition  of  others,  whose  claim  on  their  self- 
sacrifice  is  but  that  of  a  common  humanity.  This  immense 
and  irrefutable  spiritual  advance  of  man  I  take  to  be  the  evi- 
dence of  the  coming  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  on  this  earth. 

It  is  the  spiritual  work  of  a  spiritually  free  people,  striving 
for  the  best  they  know.  Once  again  I  quote  my  own  definition  of 
religion,  as  specially  applicable  here:  "//  ij  the  giving  of  the  best 
we  have  to  the  best  we  know."     And  this  not  done  for  reward. 

Now  personal  immortality  may  be  ours,  but  to  claim  it  as  a 
reward  for  good  work  here  won't  do.  It  will  not  satisfy,  for  it  im- 
plies a  moral  retreat.  No  one  more  truly  voiced  the  widening 
religious  vision  of  the  Nineteenth  Century  than  did  Tennyson. 
Yet  in  his  poem  "Wages,"  he  stoutly  maintains  that  man  must 


382  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

have  the  assurance  of  "Wages"  for  the  doing  of  highest  duty; 
a  special  reward  for  special  goodness.  Tennyson  would  rewrite 
"Wages"  to-day.  Our  moral  concept  of  duty  is  manifestly 
higher.  Tennyson  discards  older  forms  of  moral  reward. 
"Glory  of  warrior,  glory  of  orator,  glory  of  song,"  these  are 
evanescent  rewards.  Neither  do  "The  isles  of  the  blest,  the 
seats  of  the  just"  content  onward  marching  man.  But  one 
thing  he  has  a  right  to;  one  thing  he  shall  have.  Tennyson 
insists:  "Give  him  the  wages  of  going  on  and  still  to  be."  Does 
not  the  very  idea  of  any  wages  revolt  us  just  a  little  ?  The  slave 
served  under  the  lash,  the  hireling  for  his  pay.  But  just  as 
the  hireling  is  an  advance  on  the  slave,  so  is  the  son  and  brother 
relationship  an  advance  on  the  wage  taker.  The  hireling  ser- 
vice is  not  the  final  form  of  man's  relation  to  what  he  feels  to  be 
his  duty  to  himself,  to  his  brother,  and  to  his  God. 

Ah,  no !  For  striving  to  be  what  we  feel  and  know  we  should 
be,  wages  are  not  paid.  There  are  things  not  purchasable, 
and  the  first  of  these  is  doing  right. 

For  ages,  philosophers  have  debated  these  questions,  but  in 
our  own  wonderful  days  we  have  seen  the  resolution  of  them 
with  our  eyes,  and  not  in  fields  of  fancy  need  we  discuss  them 
any  longer.  We  have  seen  an  ennobling,  an  inspiring  thing: 
we  have  seen  that  not  in  the  few  and  the  great  and  the  highly 
educated  alone,  but  in  the  quite  ordinary  boy  and  man  and 
woman,  there  is  a  vision,  there  is  a  power,  great  and  noble;  a 
holy  and  a  saving  capacity  driving  him  to  give  his  poor  and  so 
inadequate  all  "  to  the  best  he  knows."  In  the  revealing  gleam 
of  the  battle  light  we  have  seen  it.  In  that  light,  so  terrible, 
certain  moral  values  became  plain  to  us  as  never  before.  Self- 
seeking,  in  all  its  forms,  was  the  one  damnable  thing  no  soldier 
could  allow  himself  to  be  guilty  of.  To  seek  his  own  meant  to 
desert  his  comrade  and  betray  his  cause.  So  it  was  that,  when 
the  minute  hand  of  the  wrist  watch  at  last  put  an  end  to  sicken- 
ing suspense,  the  youth  of  Europe  rose  and  went  "over  the  top" 
to  die.  Into  the  shell  storm,  into  the  sleet  of  the  machine  gun, 
they  went.  And  then,  out  in  the  mud,  in  thousands,  crumpled, 
sprawling  things  lay  that  lately  had  been  men. 

There  human  will  triumphed  over  human  frailty,  and  it  was 
not  done  for  pay,  not  even  for  the  wages  of  "going  on  and  still 
to  be." 


CHANGES  OF  BELIEF  383 

So  fell  a  French  lieutenant  of  infantry.  Some  of  the  sur- 
vivors of  his  company,  beaten  back,  carried  him  to  the  shelter 
of  the  trench  whence  he  had  led  them.  A  comrade  on  whose 
shoulder  he  died  heard  his  last  message:  "To  a  child  in  a  game 
it  is  a  fine  thing  to  carry  the  flag.  It  should  be  enough  for  the 
man  to  know  that  the  flag  will  be  carried." 

That  spirit  won  the  great  war,  and  because  it  burns  in  the 
heart  of  man,  the  victory  of  the  Truth  and  the  Kingdom  of  the 
Lord  of  Truth  are  sure. 

The  supreme  wonder  of  life  is  man  himself — man,  a  little 
child  of  God.  What  he  has  done,  and  is,  and  knows,  is  but  a 
poor  hint  of  what  he  shall  do,  shall  know,  and  shall  be;  man, 
God's  last,  best,  and,  so  far  as  we  know,  final  expression  of 
Himself.  To  realize  the  greatness  of  ourselves  is  not  to  minify 
God,  but  to  magnify  Him. 


CHAPTER  XXVI 

Preaching 

When  a  first-hand  religious  experience  proves  contagious  enough  to 
triumph  over  persecution,  it  becomes  itself  an  orthodoxy;  and  when  a 
religion  has  become  an  orthodoxy,  its  day  of  inwardness  is  over;  the  faith- 
ful live  at  second  hand  exclusively,  and  stone  the  prophets  in  their  turn. 
The  new  church,  in  spite  of  whatever  human  goodness  it  may  foster,  can 
be  henceforth  counted  on  as  a  staunch  ally  in  every  attempt  to  stifle  the 
spontaneous  religious  spirit,  and  stop  all  later  bubblings  of  that  fountain 
from  which,  in  purer  days,  it  drew  its  own  supply  of  inspiration. — 
William  James,  "Varieties  of  Religious  Experience"  p.  jj/. 

One  of  life's  deepest  mysteries  is  man's  influence  on  man. 
The  older  I  grow  the  more  marvellous  and  inexplicable  it  seems 
to  me.  Books,  schools,  services,  churches  cannot  supply  it, 
nor  can  Beauty,  Music,  or  Art.  It  is  not  something  man 
produces,  but  something  he  is;  it  is  increased  and  developed  by 
use;  but  it  is  born,  not  made.  They  who  possess  a  grain  of  it 
should  be  searched  for,  encouraged,  trained,  and  used.  Such 
are,  in  all  ages,  the  divinely  called  fishermen  of  Jesus.  They  it 
is  who  lead  in  all  revivals  of  true  religion. 

The  preacher  in  1920  has  the  self-same  task  as  the  preacher  in 
A.  D.  23-  His  it  is  to  make  the  multitude  who  are  spiritually 
blind  and  deaf  and  lame  and  dumb,  to  see  and  hear  and  walk  and 
speak. 

In  the  voice  of  the  preacher,  God  becomes  authentic  and 
audible  to  the  preoccupied  masses  of  everyday  folk. 

When  the  tides  of  spiritual  progress  ebb,  then  religious 
organizations  fall  back  on  the  mechanical  methods  of  the 
schools.  Organization  makes  a  great  showing.  Things  are 
mechanically  perfect,  look  well,  sound  well.  But  the  product ! 
It  is  what  the  railroad  man  calls  by  a  significant  name  a  "Dead 
Engine!"  It  has  everything  but  the  one  all-important  thing — 
Fire! 

384 


PREACHING  385 

When  Madame  Curie  discovered  radium  in  1898,  all  natural 
science  was  shaken,  and  theories  of  almost  universal  acceptance 
had  to  be  abandoned.  Man's  marvellous  and  inexplicable  in- 
fluence on  man  is  a  sort  of  human  radium.  Difficult  to  dis- 
cover, most  difficult  to  capture  or  confine,  but  once  possessed, 
with  it  goes  power.  The  preacher  has  it.  There  come  times 
when  he  is  no  longer  aware  of  himself.  Bodily  consciousness 
almost  ceases.  His  listeners,  too,  forget  outside  things.  At 
such  rare  moments  it  is  not  merely  the  words  they  hear  that 
move  them.  Some  intense  relation,  deeper  than  words, 
unites  preacher  and  listener.  The  ideas  born  within  him 
flash,  radium-like,  with  extraordinary  penetrating  power  from 
mind  to  mind,  and  a  mysterious  accord  is  established. 

Surely  there  is  a  tiny  grain  of  spiritual  radium  in  everyone 
who  has  it  in  him  to  preach.  At  the  bottom  of  successful 
church  organization  there  must  be  a  capacity  to  feed  and  in- 
spire the  workers.  Organizing  ability  is  very  important,  but 
it  is  a  quite  different  thing  from  the  subtle  quality  I  have  been 
trying  to  catch  at  and  explain. 

Energy  fades.  Enthusiasm,  so  essential  to  success  in  reli- 
gious work,  falters,  when  it  is  not  revitalized  by  this  kindling, 
persistent,  undying  spiritual  force. 

The  old  explanation,  of  course,  was  "The  Presence  of  the 
Spirit  of  God."  I  am  not  faulting  that  explanation.  I  am 
only  trying  to  find  a  way  of  putting  the  same  thing  so  that  it 
shall  have  a  little  more  understandableness  in  it.  I'll  do  here 
again  what  I  have  often  done  before — tell  a  story  to  give  point 
to  my  plea  for  a  fuller  recognition  by  the  Church  of  the  spiritual 
mystery  of  man's  influence  on  man. 

"The  Club"  in  New  York  was  a  small  but  strong  body  of 
clergy,  all  Episcopalians.  I  had  the  honour  to  be  elected  to  it 
in  1884.  One  of  the  last  meetings  of  the  club  I  attended  before 
resigning  St.  George's  was  somewhere  about  1904.  At  each 
meeting  the  host  read  a  paper  and  entertained  the  club  at 
luncheon.  It  was  my  turn  to  read  and  entertain,  and  I  chose 
as  my  subject  "Faith."  The  paper  led  to  a  long  discussion. 
I  tried  to  make  clear  that  Faith,  as  Jesus  saw  and  demanded  it, 
had  nothing  to  do  with  a  creed,  but  had  everything  to  do  with 
man's  inherent  power  to  recognize  and  yield  himself  to  supreme 
goodness.     I  said:  "Faith  is  that  divine  quality  in  man  which 


386  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

moves  him  to  recognize,  love,  and  surrender  himself  to,  the 
highest  when  he  sees  it." 

I  could  see  that  Doctor  Huntington,  who  sat  near  me,  was  not 
at  all  pleased  with  the  direction  of  the  debate.  As  was  usual 
with  him  when  he  disagreed,  he  waited  till  nearly  everyone  had 
said  his  say.  This  also,  I  knew  from  .long  acquaintance  with 
my  neighbour,  boded  no  good  to  my  paper  and  its  contention. 
When  at  last  Doctor  Huntington's  turn  came,  he  got  to  his  feet, 
which  was  unusual  with  us,  and  began  (what  I  could  instantly 
see  was  going  to  be  an  adverse  criticism  of  the  paper,  which  had 
seemed  to  gain  the  approval  of  the  majority  of  those  present) 
by  saying:  "In  the  paper  and  the  discussion  of  it,  one  all- 
important  thing,  the  ultimate  basis  of  authority,  has  been 
forgotten.  The  ultimate  basis  of  authority  is  the  Throne  of 
Almighty  God." 

This  sentence  Doctor  Huntington  pronounced  with  great 
emphasis.     Silence!  for  a  moment. 

Then,  very  slowly,  the  Rev.  P.  S.  Grant  said,  "Yes,  Doctor 
Huntington,  but  where  is  the  Throne  of  Almighty  God  if  not 
here  [touching  his  breast]  in  the  heart  of  man?" 

Doctor  Huntington  stood  without  speaking  for  a  moment. 
No  one  uttered  a  word.  And  then,  still  silent,  Doctor  Hunt- 
ington sat  down.  The  chairman  pronounced  the  blessing, 
and  we  broke  up. 

We  often  hide  our  ignorance  under  sounding  phrases  that 
have  come  to  have  a  hollow  and  unreal  meaning  in  the  ears  of 
our  listeners,  if  not  in  our  own  ears.  If  we  cannot  find  God 
in  ourselves  and  in  our  brothers,  we  surely  will  find  Him  no- 
where. So  much  is  the  meaning  of  the  tendency  in  all  world 
religions  to  emphasize  Incarnation.  Instinctively  man  feels 
that  the  only  God  he  can  ever  know  much  about  is  a  God  in 
himself  and  in  his  fellow-men.  The  universe  is  inexplicable 
without  man,  and  man  a  futile  tragedy  without  God. 

Those  who  fancy  that  the  day  of  the  preacher  is  past  are 
singularly  unobservant.  A  church  without  real  preachers  is 
without  aggressive  life.  The  Church  can  collect  and  approve 
teachings  of  her  preachers  (prophets),  but  she  cannot  either 
create  or  commission  them.  As  a  matter  of  historic  fact,  she 
has  usually  stoned  them  first  and  canonized  them  afterward. 
But  whether  they  are  stoned  or  canonized,  in  such  are  the 


PREACHING  387 

chief  among  the  sources  of  divine  authority  we  know.  They 
voice  the  spirit  of  God  to  men.  All  the  Church  can  do,  all  she  has 
ever  done,  is  to  gather  the  sermons,  the  prayers,  the  poetry, 
the  writings,  of  these  prophets  and  teachers  for  the  uses  of 
the  future. 

We  know  more  psychology  than  Paul  did,  but  no  substitute 
has  been  found  for  that  transforming  spiritual  power  he  spoke  of 
when,  writing  to  the  Corinthians,  he  said:  "It  pleased  God  by 
the  foolishness  of  preaching  to  save  them  that  believe."  True 
wisdom  it  is  to  get  back  to  the  practices  of  Jesus  and  of  Paul. 

Nothing,  to  my  mind,  wiser,  truer,  or  more  needed,  has  been 
addressed  to  the  churches  in  our  time  than  the  warning  with 
which  I  have  headed  this  chapter.  Professor  James's  words 
are,  I  believe,  as  truly  inspired  of  God  the  Holy  Ghost  as  are 
any  pronouncements  coming  to  us  from  anybody  clerical  claim- 
ing divine  authority.  James  is  on  the  side  of  the  Preacher, 
and,  being  so,  he  is  in  good,  if  often  unpopular  and  unorthodox, 
company. 

Writing  so  much  about  preaching,  many  will  count  me  as 
an  egoist,  perhaps  pushing  aside  what  I  say  as  of  little  worth. 
Yet  in  all  I  have  herein  set  down  in  my  life  story  there  is  noth- 
ing of  more  importance  than  this  appeal  of  mine  to  my  friends 
with  whom  I  may  still  have  some  influence  to  face  fully  the 
danger  to  real  religion,  if  we  allow  ourselves  to  follow  the  prec- 
edent the  churches,  some  more  than  others,  but  all  of  them, 
have  so  steadily  pursued,  in  discouraging  rather  than  encourag- 
ing the  preacher. 

Ecumenical  Councils  may  call  from  Rome;  Lambeth  Con- 
ferences may  plead  from  Canterbury — the  thinking,  feeling, 
working,  hoping  millions,  who  live  for  the  future  (and  it  is 
theirs)  do  not  even  hear  Rome's  thunder  or  Canterbury's  call. 
To  them  the  priest  speaks  no  longer.  They  are  through  with 
him.  One  man,  one  sort  of  man  alone,  can  reach  them.  That 
is  the  man  who  has  the  same  qualifications  that  those  plain  men 
had  who,  two  thousand  years  ago,  started  forth  from  a  tenement 
house  in  Jerusalem  to  turn  the  Old  World  right  side  up.  (1) 
They  were  part  of  their  time.  (2)  They  had  the  tongue  of 
Fire.  Or,  put  it  another  way,  they  understood  men  and  knew 
what  they  were  longing  for,  and  they  were  indwelt  by  the 
Holy  Ghost,  that  uplifting  power  in  man. 


388  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

People  would  take  anything  from  such  men,  and  people  will 
take  anything  from  a  real  preacher  still.  You  can  say  almost 
anything  to  one  you  would  help,  if  you  hold  his  hand  and  look 
him  in  the  eye. 

My  conviction  is  that  men  will  eagerly  listen  to  the  preacher 
who  says  right  out  what  their  own  hearts  are  whispering  to 
them.  Men  never  felt  the  need  of  the  Gospel  of  Jesus  as  they 
do  to-day.  To  uplift  our  land;  to  better  mankind;  to  inspire 
and  enable  us  to  live  as  brothers  together,  not  as  mere  competi- 
tors apart.  This  was  the  aim  of  Jesus,  and  right  now  no  re- 
former worth  the  name  has  any  other  aim. 

This  sacred  cause,  holy  above  all  other  causes,  can  and  does 
inspire  to  unselfish,  self-sacrificing  effort,  not  a  few  very  great 
souls  alone  who  greatly  lead  our  race,  but  multitudes  of  less 
gifted,  whose  work  is  just  as  essential  to  the  common  salvation 
as  is  the  work  of  the  greatest  of  the  great. 

If  the  present  church  is  to  live,  it  must  find  courage  and 
prescience  to  seek  out  among  those  thousands  whose  aim  is 
Christlike,  men  and  women,  too,  born  with  the  preacher's 
spirit  within  them.  Such  too  often  drift  into  the  ranks  of 
crankdom  because  they  have  not  been  fortunate  enough  to 
find  someone  like  Saint  Philip  of  long  ago,  who  expounded  the 
way  of  God  more  perfectly  to  the  Ethiopian  eunuch,  as  he  rode 
back  to  his  distant  country  all  uncertain  and  dissatisfied  with 
what  orthodoxy  at  Jerusalem  had  been  able  to  give  him. 

Preachers  who  can  help  in  these  truth-seeking,  truth-loving 
days  of  ours,  should  have  some  education  in  the  field  of  com- 
parative religions,  for  we  nowhere  make  solid  gain  in  any  field 
of  knowledge  unless  we  build  on  what  has  been  won  for  us  by 
those  who  in  the  past  have  proved  themselves  loyal  to  the  truth. 
Even  inspiration  needs  education;  neither  can  succeed  without 
the  other. 

As  I  look  back  on  my  life,  I  see  more  clearly  than  I  did  that 
we  poor  differing  mortals  need  differing  forms  of  the  religion  of 
Jesus.  But  more  firmly  than  ever  I  believe  that,  within  the 
wide  bounds  of  that  religion,  all  healthy,  growing  religions  can 
find  comfort,  inspiration,  and  peace.  It  is  their  blind  in- 
sistence on  uniformity  of  creed  and  order  that  has  robbed  ortho- 
doxies of  their  very  life. 

We  must  have  widely  differing  forms  of  religion  if  we  are  to 


PREACHING  389 

worship  in  spirit  and  in  truth.  The  same  uniform  coat  cannot 
be  made  to  fit  us  all,  nor  can  each  be  satisfied  with  the  same 
vision  of  God. 

Billy  Sunday's  preaching  will  reach  and  uplift  some  to  whom 
Phillips  Brooks's  inspired  storm  would  have  been  sheer  non- 
sense. How  long  Billy  Sunday's  influence  will  last,  or,  indeed, 
Phillips  Brooks's,  either,  will  depend  on  how  worthy  or  un- 
worthy of  man's  worship  is  the  vision  of  God  those  preachers 
presented  to  their  time. 

Dwight  Moody,  simple,  honest,  wholly  consecrated  Dwight 
Moody,  shook  religious  life  in  England  partly  out  of  its  Victo- 
rian lethargy,  but  not  out  of  its  quite  dreadful  self-complacency. 
Moody  believed  in  an  inerrant,  infallible,  inspired  Bible — a 
quite  impossible  creed.  But  since  he  loved  the  Lord  Jesus  and 
his  fellow-men  and  could  preach,  he  was  a  blessing  wherever  he 
went. 

Henry  Drummond  joined  Mr.  Moody  when  first  Mr.  Moody 
came  to  Scotland.  His  was  a  message  to  those  who  needed  a 
gospel  not  lacking  an  intellectual  appeal.  Drummond,  unlike 
Moody,  was  a  scholar,  and  he  was  the  first  preacher  I  listened 
to  in  those  days  of  my  youth  with  real  delight.  Somehow  he 
seemed  to  bring  with  him  a  freer  air,  a  wider  vision,  than  other 
popular  preachers  of  the  time. 

I  had  my  inerrant  Bible,  and  my  "plan  of  salvation,"  both 
"received  by  tradition  from  my  fathers,"  both  gripped  fast,  for 
I  knew  nothing  better.  Yet  instinctively  I  felt  they  did  not 
meet  the  needs  of  my  own  soul. 

My  feeling  about  Henry  Drummond  was  more  instinctive 
than  reasoned;  and  it  was  not  till  twelve  years  after  I  first 
listened  to  him,  and  I  read  his  "Natural  Law  and  Spiritual 
World,"  that  I  understood  the  naturalness  of  the  power  he  had 
had  over  me  when  I  was  a  boy. 

Henry  Drummond  had  been  brought  up  as  I  had  been  in  the 
narrowest  of  narrow  schools.  (The  two  Cairds  and  the  men 
of  their  school  had  not  yet  won  the  ear  of  Scotland.) 

Being  a  scholar  and  an  ardent  naturalist,  Henry  Drummond 
was  certain  to  become  an  evolutionist,  and  the  "Origin  of 
Species"  and  the  inerrant  verbally  inspired  Bible  were  mutually 
destructive.  "Natural  Law  in  the  Spiritual  World"  was  per- 
haps the  best  attempt  at  proving  they  were  not  mutually 


39o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

destructive  that  appeared.  The  popularity  of  the  book  was 
immediate  and  immense.  I  remember  well  the  first  time  I 
heard  of  it.  I  had  occasion  to  visit  one  morning  my  good 
neighbour  Henry  Y.  Satterlee,  then  rector  of  Calvary  Church, 
New  York,  afterward  Bishop  of  Washington.  Satterlee  was 
not  usually  an  excitable  man.  This  morning  I  found  him  pro- 
foundly moved.  Walking  up  and  down  his  study,  holding  the 
book  in  his  hand,  he  said,  "Rainsford,  here  is  the  book  the 
Church  of  God  has  long  been  waiting  for.  This  man  shows 
the  way  to  the  reconcilement  of  science  and  religion." 

I  bought  the  book  at  once  and  read  it.  I  remember  I  sat  up 
almost  all  of  the  next  night  reading  it.  It  seemed  to  me  that 
much  in  it  was  good.  Some  part  of  it  deserved  to  live,  but  its 
main  contention  was  quite  evidently  untenable.  Briefly  it 
was  this:  "Till  man  is  converted,  he  is  in  the  inorganic  world 
spiritually.  When  he  is  converted  and  born  again,  he  enters  the 
organic  world  spiritually." 

In  his  own  way,  clothing  his  thought  as  he  always  did  in 
beautiful  prose,  Henry  Drummond  had  worked  out  this  new 
presentation  of  the  old  doctrine  of  the  need  of  new  birth.  It 
was  very  clever,  but  there  was  this  finally  fatal  flaw  in  the  argu- 
ment: If  man,  before  entering  the  family  of  God  by  conversion 
and  new  birth,  was  in  the  kingdom  of  the  inorganic,  then  he 
was  not  responsible  for  his  action — a  stone  cannot  sin. 

The  book  won  the  ear  of  orthodoxy  everywhere.  The  Church 
praised  it,  the  scientists  tore  it  to  pieces.  But  Drummond  had 
henceforth  the  ear  of  millions,  and  wisely  and  humbly,  too,  he 
spoke  for  his  Master  to  men.  Hundreds  of  thousands  read  with 
delight  his  "  Greatest  Thing  in  the  World."  To  say  it  is  worthy 
of  its  text  (I  Cor.  xui)  is  not  too  high  praise. 

We  corresponded  occasionally,  but  did  not  meet  again  till 
in  1892  we  met  at  Harvard.  He  was  Lowell  lecturer,  and  I 
was  Baccalaureate  preacher.  I  can  never  forget  that  Sunday 
evening  when  he  preached  for  the  last  time  in  this  country. 
Henry  Drummond  held  the  great  audience  that  packed  the 
chapel  in  the  hollow  of  his  hand.  I  can  see  him  now,  standing 
with  one  arm  behind  his  back,  in  the  ugly  pepper-box  pulpit. 
He  spoke  without  notes  for  forty-five  minutes,  seldom  raised 
his  voice,  seldom  made  a  gesture,  never  hesitated  for  a  word  or 
changed  a  sentence;  and  on  his  listeners  fell  the  power  of  God. 


PREACHING  391 

As  Baccalaureate  preacher  that  day,  my  place  was  next 
President  Eliot,  in  the  President's  pew.  The  President  came 
to  chapel  that  night  in  a  grumpy  mood.  He  was  no  lover  of 
the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  as  everybody  knows,  yet  for 
three  successive  anniversaries  an  Episcopalian  had,  by  the 
vote  of  the  graduating  class,  been  thrust  on  him — Bishop  H.  C. 
Potter,  Bishop  Wm.  Lawrence,  and  myself.  Drummond's 
theology,  too,  he  disliked,  and  his  scientific  knowledge  he  dis- 
trusted. But  as  the  blessing  was  given  and  all  rose  to  go,  I 
heard  my  neighbour  murmur  to  himself,  "  I  never  heard  any- 
thing like  it." 

Already  Drummond's  health  was  failing,  and  all  too  soon, 
for  the  youth  of  both  our  land  and  England's  empire,  he  was 
to  lay  down  his  great  and  faithfully  kept  charge. 

Immediately  at  the  conclusion  of  his  lectures  at  Harvard,  he 
came  up  with  Mr.  W.  E.  Dodge  to  the  Restigouche  Salmon 
Club,  of  which  I  was  a  member.  I  saw  that  he  was  very  much 
tired  and  greatly  needed  a  long  rest.  But  alas !  it  was  not  to  be. 
Said  he  to  me  one  day,  "  Can  you  find  me  a  quiet  place  by  this 
lovely  river  where  I  can  work?"  I  urged  rest,  not  work. 
"No,"  said  he,  "I  am  all  on  fire  with  this  subject.  My  lec- 
tures are  full  of  things  I  must  alter.  I  cannot  afford  to  do 
again  what  I  did  in  'Natural  Law  in  the  Spiritual  World.'  I 
am  going  to  rewrite  these  Lowell  lectures,  and  I  must  do  it  now." 

I  urged  delay.  He  could  weigh  things  better  when  he  had 
had  a  rest  and  had  returned  to  his  home  and  library.  "I 
cannot  wait.  I  don't  even  care  for  salmon  fishing  till  this 
thing  is  done." 

So  we  got  him  rooms  in  the  one  quiet,  comfortable  riverside 
farmhouse  (Dawson's)  that  there  then  was  in  that  lonely, 
beautiful  country,  some  miles  up  river  from  the  club.  And 
there,  working  on  into  the  autumn,  he  rewrote  the  "Ascent 
of  Man,"  and  when  he  had  finished  it,  went  home  to  die. 

Ah!  So  young!  So  human,  so  natural,  so  honest  in  his 
religion,  so  profoundly  catholic  in  his  understanding  and  love 
of  his  fellow-men !  Surely  it  was  just  as  true  of  him  as  of  John 
the  Baptist,  "There  was  a  man  sent  from  God,  whose  name  was 
Henry  Drummond." 

I  saw  a  beautiful  thing  lately  that  finely  illustrates  the  real 
purpose    and   value   of  preaching.     An    amazingly    beautiful 


392  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

thing,  yet  almost  unknown.  Another  strange  thing  about  it 
was,  it  was  the  work  of  the  much-abused  State  of  New  York. 

My  son  Kerr  and  I  just  happened  on  it — no  guide  book  we 
had  read  said  anything  about  it,  nor  was  its  near-by  presence, 
as  we  motored,  flaunted  in  our  faces  by  one  of  those  common, 
highly  coloured  boardings  that  both  illustrate  and  outrage 
American  taste.  It  bore  a  secular  title  enough,  "Aerating  plant 
of  the  Ashokan  Reservoir."  No  one  claimed  for  it  artistic 
merit.  Yet,  when  all  unprepared,  we  suddenly  looked  down  on 
it  from  the  height  of  the  Great  Dam  that  shut  in  the  gathered 
waters  of  the  Catskills,  the  wonder  of  its  utter  beauty  struck  us 
both  for  a  moment  dumb. 

Imagine  all  the  famous  fountains  of  Europe,  Versailles, 
Rome,  Vienna,  London,  assembled  in  one  ample  basin,  all  in 
full  play,  and  they  are  shrunken  and  yellow  dancers  of  the 
long  past  beside  this,  our  own  virgin  dancer  of  the  mountains. 

Hundreds  and  hundreds  of  snowy  columns  of  silver  spray, 
clear  and  clean,  rising,  ceaselessly  rising,  in  rejoicing  power. 
Never  failing,  never  pausing,  in  rush  and  play  and  watery  roar. 
It  was  as  though  the  spirit  of  the  lake  there  unveiled  her  fresh, 
pure  beauty  to  the  eyes  of  men. 

As  my  son  and  I  had  motored  among  the  foothills  of  the 
Catskills,  we  had  seen  the  sources  of  those  brooks  and  rivers 
that  fed  the  great  reservoir.  There,  behind  its  mighty  dam, 
they  were  assembled  to  assure  the  health  and  comfort  of  the 
distant  city.  Thence  they  would  flow  into  every  palace  and 
tenement  house  of  New  York.  But  why  the  wild  beauty  of  the 
great  basin  we  had  been  looking  on  ? 

Ah,  experience  had  decreed  that  even  those  clear  mountain 
waters  needed  to  be  aerated,  purified  for  the  use  of  man,  by 
the  mighty  fountain  play  that  had  fascinated  us. 

As  I  leaned  over  the  dam  wall  and  watched  the  myriad  sil- 
very columns  rising,  the  thought  came  to  me:  the  creeds  and 
dogmas  and  beliefs  we  have  inherited  and  lived  by  and  still 
hold  dear — they  are  like  the  great  reservoir  behind  me,  things 
of  proved  good,  needed  by  the  life  of  men.  They,  like  these 
waters,  have  been  slowly  gathered  from  many  sources  and 
many  springs.  Far  away  people  in  the  mountains,  in  cottages 
in  scattered  villages,  have  lived  by  them,  have  used  them.  But 
if  they  are  to  be  of  fullest  service  to  the  great  world  of  thought 


PREACHING  393 

and  of  action,  they  must  be  recharged,  shot  through  afresh 
with  the  new  hopes,  new  discoveries,  new  aims,  of  the  present 
they  are  created  to  strengthen  and  to  serve. 

From  the  old  lake  life  of  the  ancient  mountains  they  must 
pass  in  the  collective  life  of  the  reservoir,  and  then  through  the 
newer,  searching  cleansing  of  the  fountain,  before  they  are 
finally  fitted  to  cleanse  and  comfort  the  home  of  modern  man. 

Ah,  yes,  the  very  best  of  the  old  doctrines  need  aerating 
to-day;  need  the  entrance,  the  penetration,  of  the  living  spirit  of 
the  time  to  vitalize  and  purify  them.  What  the  fountains 
are  to  the  reservoir,  the  preacher-teacher  is  to  the  church. 

Some  say  to  me,  "Why  harp  on  so  axiomatic  a  thing?  Of 
course  what  you  say  is  true,  but  what  of  it?" 

I  harp  on  it  because,  wherever  I  look,  in  my  own  church  and 
in  all  churches,  I  see  a  failing  to  win  and  hold  the  attention  of 
the  people.  I  harp  on  it,  for  the  reason  of  their  failure  is  as 
plain  as  the  fact.  The  churches,  through  their  organized  and 
recognized  ministers,  are  serving  out  to  the  world  unaerated 
doctrine.  And  the  world  won't  have  it.  Not  because  the 
world  does  not  want  Christianity;  not  because  the  world  does 
not  know  that  it  wants  Christianity,  but  because  the  world  is 
slowly  becoming  convinced  that  the  sort  of  Christianity  served 
out  by  bishops  and  priests  and  ministers  is  an  utterly  inade- 
quate Christianity,  and  has  lost  its  power  to  save  men  from 
their  sins.  Their  real  sins  I  mean;  not  perhaps  the  sins  they 
talk  about. 

The  churches  are  saying:  "Listen  to  the  Gospel.  We  guar- 
antee its  purity.  We  know  where  it  comes  from.  The  source 
was  pure.  We  have  kept  it  pure.  It  saved  the  soul  of  man 
alive  in  the  past.  It  will  save  you  now.  We  offer  you  in  the 
name  of  the  Trinity,  the  old,  old  Gospel,  mediated  by  our  an- 
cient and  divinely  appointed  order.     Come,  drink,  and  live." 

And  millions,  unconvinced,  are  turning  away,  saying  (perhaps 
under  their  breath):  "We  don't  want  an  old,  old  gospel.  We 
want  a  gospel  of  our  own.  The  times  have  changed.  We  are 
in  a  new  world.  Everything  in  it  is  new.  We  want  a  new 
gospel." 

And  this  demand  of  the  unsatisfied  is  sound.  The  cravings 
of  man's  soul  are  sound.     If  visibly  the  Lord  Jesus  walked  on 


394  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

earth  again,  to  these  multitudes  He  would  go,  and  to  Him  they 
would  listen.  And  with  the  churches  he  would  have  just 
the  same  fight  all  over  again,  that  He  had  with  those  orthodox 
orderly  priests  in  Judea  long  ago. 

The  Gospel  of  the  Lord  Jesus  is  never  an  old  gospel  but  ever 
a  new.  And  those  good  but  most  mistaken  people  who  talk 
of  the  old  gospel  are  grievously  misstating  the  message  of 
Jesus  to  our  age.  They  it  is  who  are  making  the  "Truth  of 
God  of  none  effect  through  their  tradition."  They  may  rail 
at  the  priests  and  the  Sadducees  of  the  New  Testament  times, 
but  they  are  their  lineal  descendants  in  our  own. 

The  really  great  things  that  are  done  to-day  (and  immensely 
great  things  are  being  done)  are  done  by  the  preacher.  Oh,  I 
don't  mean  the  man  in  a  surplice  or  black  gown.  I  mean  the 
man  that  wins  multitudes  to  see  a  great  opportunity  for  service; 
as  Mr.  Hoover  did,  when  he  taught  us  how  to  hold  out  bread 
to  a  hungry  world,  or  as  Theodore  Roosevelt  did,  when  he 
preached  in  season  and  out  of  season,  all  up  and  down  our  land, 
till  he  made  men  see  that  the  cause  of  humanity  was  the  cause 
of  the  Allies  and  we  were  forever  dishonoured  if  we  did  not  fight 
for  it. 

If  this  claimof  mine  that  God  the  Living  Spirit,  God  the  Holy 
Ghost,  filled  such  men,  and  wrought  His  Holy  Will  by  them  and 
in  them,  sound  little  short  of  blasphemy  to  some,  I  can't  help 
it.     If  I  am  sure  of  anything,  I  am  sure  I  am  right. 

I  lunched  with  Mr.  Roosevelt  the  day  before  he  sailed  on 
that  most  ill-advised  South  American  adventure  of  his,  where 
he  got  his  death.  He  said  to  me,  when  I  again  urged  him  not 
to  go:  ^ 

"Rainsford,  the  American  people  are  tired  of  me." 

I  told  him  he  had  never  been  more  mistaken  in  his  life;  that 
he  did  not  realize  where  he  stood  with  the  people;  that  they 
loved  him  and  trusted  him  and  would  follow  him  anywhere, 
as  they  would  no  other  man  in  the  land. 

Well,  the  future  proved  me  even  more  right  than  I  knew. 
But  why  did  they  love  that  man  ?  Why  did  they  follow  him  ? 
Why  did  the  very  chiefest  of  his  political  enemies  of  the  past, 
led  by  William  Barnes  of  Albany  himself,  one  of  those  men 
who,  using  every  unscrupulous  political  trick,  in  191 2,  robbed 
Roosevelt  of  the  Presidential  nomination — why  did  they,  one 


PREACHING  395 

and  all,  beg  him  to  accept  the  Republican  nomination  for 
Governor  of  the  State  of  New  York  in  1918  ? 

Because,  as  William  Barnes  himself  admitted,  when  it  was 
too  late:  "We  required  above  all  else,  in  the  highest  affairs  of 
trust  and  power,  not  only  men  of  integrity  and  character, 
but  primarily  men  who  can  see  into  the  future — men  of 
vision." * 

The  professional  politician  owns  at  last  the  preacher's  power. 
Roosevelt  had  no  party  then,  no  organization  back  of  him, 
yet  without  the  aid  of  either  he  had  the  confident  love  of  the 
nation.  And  more,  he  had  turned  his  chief  enemies  into 
friends.  It  was  in  truth  the  hour  of  his  supreme  victory,  and 
he  thought  the  people  who  loved  him  were  tired  of  him,  and 
needed  him  no  longer! 

Roosevelt's  story  is  a  message  for  all  time.  We  may  not  see 
it  now,  but  our  children's  children  will  read  it,  and  be  proud  of  it. 
He  made  old  things,  old  good  things,  real,  vital,  present  things 
to  millions. 

A  clever  cynic  said,  "Roosevelt  discovered  the  Ten  Com- 
mandments." 

Well,  they  were  a  pretty  good  thing  to  discover,  and 
they  needed  rediscovering  just  then.  And  if,  as  the  major- 
ity of  his  party  wished,  he  had  been  their  candidate  for  Presi- 
dent in  191 2,  who  shall  say  what  vast  benefit  to  mankind  might 
not  have  resulted? 

Some  reader,  I  doubt  not,  is  saying  by  now,  "This  sermon  of 
yours  on  preaching  is  like  one  of  the  sermons  you  used  to  preach 
in  St.  George's — much  too  long."  I  plead  guilty,  but  in  my 
defence  I  say,  the  starting  of  our  work  in  St.  George's,  its  con- 
tinuance, its  progress,  and  its  influence,  were  dependent  primar- 
ily on  preaching — on  my  own  preaching  first  of  all,  and  full  of 
shortcomings  and  mistakes  it  surely  was.  But  it  was  good 
enough  to  catch  men,  all  sorts  of  men,  and  to  retain  and  inspire 
some  of  the  best  so  caught. 

Thousands  of  men  in  the  land  would  have  made  better 
preachers  than  I,  but  somehow  they  have  not  been  discovered, 
welcomed,  and  commissioned  by  the  church.  And  more,  so 
long  as  the  unreformed  theological  seminaries,  Protestant 
Episcopal,  Roman   Catholic,  most  of  the  Presbyterian  and 

1"Roosevelt,  Life,"  by  Bishop,  Vol.  ii,  p.  454. 


396  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Baptist  and  Methodist  seminaries,  are  conducted  on  their 
present  lines,  and  are  the  usual  and  the  normal  way  a  man  must 
take  to  reach  the  pulpit,  so  long  the  churches  will  continue  to 
shut  out  of  their  pulpits  the  very  men  who  alone  can  save  them 
from  falling  to  pieces  with  dry  rot. 

The  letters  a  preacher  receives  from  those  he  has  helped  are 
multitudinous.  A  part  of  one  such — from  Alexis  Stein — I  must 
print  here,  for  in  it  he  has  defined  a  quality  in  preaching  too 
generally  overlooked.  It  was  his  last  letter  to  me,  written 
shortly  before  his  death. 

It  is  hard  for  me  to  write  of  Alexis  Stein;  for  nothing  in  my 
ministry  am  I  more  thankful  than  that  I  was  able  to  be  some 
help,  to  give  some  guidance,  to  that  rarely  gifted,  rarely  beauti- 
ful soul,  during  the  first  years  of  his  so  brief  ministry.  Alexis 
Stein  came  to  me  as  assistant  in  1895,  and  left  me  to  take,  with 
his  friend,  Rev.  Frank  Nelson,  charge  of  Christ  Church,  Cin- 
cinnati, in  1898.  He  was  shy  and  self-conscious,  a  man  born  to 
suffer;  much  within  himself  to  struggle  against.  But  he  had  a 
heart  of  gold,  and  a  little  of  that  transmuting  thing,  Genius. 
If  he  had  lived  Alexis  Stein  would  have  been  the  greatest 
preacher  in  the  Episcopal  Church. 

Little  more  than  a  year  after  he  had  entered  on  his  work  at 
Christ  Church,  I  dined  with  Mr.  Taft  the  evening  before  he 
sailed  for  the  Philippines  as  Governor.  Mr.  Taft  knew  Cin- 
cinnati thoroughly.  I  asked  him  how  Stein  was  getting  on. 
Said  Mr.  Taft:  "He  is  on  his  way  to  be  the  first  citizen  of  Cin- 
cinnati." 

Just  fourteen  months  after  Stein  and  Nelson  took  charge,  I 
unexpectedly  looked  in  on  "my  boys,"  on  my  way  back  from 
Nashville,  where  I  had  been  holding  a  mission  in  Doctor  Man- 
ning's church.  I  found  Stein  coughing  and  feverish.  He  took 
no  care  of  himself,  and  had  to  be  dragged  to  a  doctor.  The  rest 
was  a  protracted  struggle  with  disease.  At  one  time  tuber- 
culosis seemed  defeated,  and  he  was  called  to  a  field  he  longed  to 
occupy,  and  none  in  the  land  could  have  better  filled  it  than  he: 
the  chaplaincy  of  Columbia  University.  It  was  not  to  be. 
Tubercular  trouble  reappeared,  and  the  end  was  near. 

Thanks  for  your  long  letter.  I  have  read  and  reread  it.  It  recalled  you 
to  me,  and  the  things  you  used  to  do  and  say.     And  I  sit  here,  and  again 


PREACHING  397 

you  are  back  in  the  old  pulpit,  floundering  and  stammering  and  preaching  the 
Word  of  God  as  I  have  never  heard  it  preached  from  any  other  mouth.  .  .  . 

I  think  it  was  your  great  human-ness  that  did  it.  You  were  to  me  so  real, 
so  close  to  fact,  so  earthly  and  fleshly.  I  would  feel  the  divineness  easily  and 
naturally  when  you  spoke  of  the  Great  matters.  I  have  heard  others  talk 
better  than  you,  but  they  were  trumpets;  you  were  a  voice,  a  living  Voice.  I 
think  it  is  to  that  quality  in  you  I  owe  the  most  of  what  you  gave  me.  I  think 
of  you  a  great  deal. 

A.  W.  S. 

Too  many  allow  their  profession  to  master,  enslave,  and 
finally  kill  the  real  man  in  them.  The  cleric  has  no  monopoly 
of  such  gradual  self-murder,  but  unfortunately  he  is  an  adept  at 
it.  To  all  ministers  it  is  a  danger.  But,  taking  it  all  in  all,  in 
spite  of  some  manifest  drawbacks,  no  other  profession  is  com- 
parable to  the  clerical  for  the  opportunity  of  service  it  offers. 

One  of  my  friends,  a  bishop,  asked  me  lately  if  I  had  to  do  it 
over  again,  would  I  be  a  minister?    Of  course  I  would! 

It  is  sixteen  years  since  I  resigned  from  St.  George's  pulpit. 
Far  the  larger  number  of  my  old  friends  are  dead.  Those  re- 
maining are  widely  scattered,  and  I  have  no  way  of  reaching 
them.  But  at  the  annual  dinner  to  which  they  invited  me  in 
May,  1 92 1,  we  sat  down,  three  hundred  and  forty,  and  what  an 
unforgettable  evening  we  had  together! 

If  I  were  beginning  again,  and  I  wish  I  was,  I  would  be  a  min- 
ister in  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  that  is  if  they  would 
let  me  into  it.  There  is  no  profession  so  well  paid,  for  no  other 
draws  fees  so  rich,  or  receives  its  fees  in  such  imperishable  coin. 
The  joy  of  serving  and  of  helping,  the  response  of  soul  to  soul, 
of  fire  kindling  fire — these  call  forth  all  that  is  best  in  the  man. 
Then  the  fine  freedom  it  offers  to  the  preacher  who  wills  to  be 
free! 

I  speak  the  simple  truth:  there  is  no  platform  in  all  the  land 
to-day  where  such  freedom  of  utterance  is  expected  and  wel- 
comed as  the  pulpit  of  the  Christian  church.  People  have  al- 
ways crowded,  and  always  will  crowd,  to  hear  that  man  who 
realizes  the  immense  opportunity  of  the  pulpit  and  does  his 
best  to  be  worthy  of  it. 

The  pulpit  can  be  free.  The  pulpit  must  be  free.  If  it  is  not 
free,  it  is  not  the  fault  of  the  people  in  the  pews;  they  will  back 
ever  the  teacher  who  reverences  the  truth  and  speaks  his  mind, 
even  if  he  may  be,  and  he  is  sure  to  be,  unwise  and  mistaken  in 


398  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

some  things.  It  is  the  inner  circle  of  the  vestry  that  at  times 
threatens  the  freedom  of  the  pulpit,  and  before  these  conser- 
vative and  often  reactionary  gentlemen,  who  hold  the  purse 
strings,  the  timid  or  peace-loving  clergy  fail  to  make  a  stand. 

The  custom  of  appointing  to  vestries  men  rich  and  socially 
influential  rather  than  men  more  truly  representative  of  the 
congregation  has  done,  and  is  doing,  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church  grievous  harm. 

I  was  always  supported  by  my  vestry,  partly  because  my 
senior  warden,  from  the  very  first  year  of  my  rectorship  to  the 
last,  supported  my  policies;  not  with  his  vote  only,  but  with 
his  money.  And  also  because  my  vestrymen,  all  of  them,  knew 
that  if  they  could  not  support  me  officially,  their  reelection  to 
that  body  would  be  impossible. 

As  years  pass,  I  increasingly  appreciate  what  I  owe  to  my 
people.  Not  to  a  few,  but  to  thousands,  many  but  slightly 
known,  I  owe  a  debt  of  gratitude  quite  unpayable.  They 
trusted  me,  they  unburdened  their  hearts  to  me,  and  often  it 
was  from  those  unburdenings  my  best  sermons  grew. 

Better  and  more  lasting  than  books  or  plays  or  pictures  is 
the  work  of  the  preacher  who  lives  among  his  people,  though 
to  the  unobservant  it  seems  to  have  little  permanence.  He 
reaches  hosts  of  people  who,  for  one  or  another  cause' — want  of 
time,  or  want  of  education,  or  want  of  taste — are  not  greatly 
influenced  by  them.  The  writer  offers  them  facts;  the  drama- 
tist, life;  and  the  artist,  beauty — in  vain.  But  the  preacher, 
himself  susceptible  to  the  most  vital  currents  of  his  time,  re- 
ceives and  gives  forth.  It  is  as  natural  and  necessary  to  him  as 
breathing.  And  with  what  he  gives  goes  a  certain  subtle 
something;  something  of  himself  he  gives  to  those  he  reaches. 
He  may  not  know  it,  nor  may  his  hearers,  but  long  after  he  has 
passed  on  and  is  forgotten,  that  seed  of  his  own  life  grows  and 
yields  fruit  in  the  lives  of  other  men.    Is  that  not  worth  doing  ? 

I  say  you  can  do  more  good,  you  can  see  more  good,  yes,  and 
in  a  not  unworthy  sense  you  can  have  yourself  a  better  time  in 
the  ministry  than  in  any  other  profession  on  earth. 

And  now  one  short  closing  word  about  my  own  dear  church. 
In  spite  of  the  fact  that  it  has  become  a  class  church,  try  to 
enter  its  ministry.  The  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  was  not 
intended  to  be  a  class  church.     In  spite  of  its  safe  policies  and 


PREACHING  399 

safe  bishops,  in  spite  of  its  system  of  representative  government 
that  makes  a  farce  of  representative  government,  press  into 
it,  stay  in  it,  and  from  within  fight  to  reform  and  liberalize  it. 

We  are  in  but  "the  morning  of  the  times."  We  are  on  the 
eve  of  great  events.  I  long  to  see  that  church  which  should  be 
most  comprehensive  of  all  Christian  churches,  for  she  repre- 
sents a  main  current  of  the  religious  evolution  of  the  most  com- 
prehending and  comprehensive  of  the  world's  great  races ,  take  the 
place  that,  by  right  of  her  great  past,  is  hers.  She  should  in- 
spire and  guide  the  hearts  of  men  in  the  great  new  days  coming 
as  she  did  in  the  great  days  of  old. 

But  if  she  would  do  so,  she  must  find,  equip,  and  commission 
the  preacher. 


CHAPTER  XXVII 

Theodore  Roosevelt 


By  time,  I  du  like  a  man  that  ain't  afeard. 

HOSEA  BlGELOW 


Nothing  I  have  to  leave  my  sons  do  I  so  highly  value  as  a 
photograph,  and  a  few  words  written  in  a  shaky  hand  under- 
neath it.  Shortly  before  he  died,  Theodore  Roosevelt  sent  it 
to  me: 

To  Dr.  W.  S.  Rainsford, 

From  his  old  friend,  fellow  worker,  and  admirer. 
Theodore  Roosevelt. 

He  was  hated  by  some  and  feared  by  some,  as  a  good 
man  if  he  is  brave  (which  good  men  too  often  are  not)  ever 
must  be.  But  he  was  the  most  loved  and  trusted  man  of  our 
time. 

He  honoured  me  first  with  an  acquaintanceship,  and  later 
with  a  friendship,  for  which  I  can  never  sufficiently  thank 
him. 

He  had  faults,  of  course.  These  stood  out  on  the  surface  of 
the  man.  He  was  at  times  intemperate  in  his  advocacies  as 
well  as  in  his  oppositions.  I  do  not  think  that  his  judgment 
of  men  was  unusually  good,  though  he  had  confidence  in  his 
judgment  of  men.  He  was  impetuous,  a  trifling  fault.  He 
was  ambitious,  a  second-class  virtue.  As  father  and  husband 
there  could  be  none  more  tender  or  more  true. 

To  the  land  he  ruled  and  loved,  his  highest  faith  and  an  al- 
most religious  devotion  were  given.  For  her  sake  "he  counted 
not  his  life  dear  unto  himself." 

To  me  he  was  the  kindest,  most  charitable,  most  faithful 

400 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  401 

friend  a  man  ever  had.  When  I  resigned  St.  George's,  a  sick 
and  broken  man,  a  friend  of  mine  told  him  of  the  book  Dean 
Hodges  and  John  Reichert,  my  secretary,  were  jointly  bringing 
out,  describing  the  sort  of  church  I  had  striven  for — the  Insti- 
tutional Church.  He  said  he  would  write  an  introduction  to 
it.    Here  is  what  he  then  wrote : 


BY  THEIR  FRUITS  SHALL  YE  KNOW  THEM 

The  Church  must  be  a  living,  breathing,  vital  force,  or  it  is  no  real  church; 
and  therefore  not  only  all  good  citizens,  but  especially  all  earnest  Christians 
are  under  a  real  debt  of  obligation  to  the  Rev.  William  S.  Rainsford  for  what 
he  has  done  with  St.  George's  Church  in  New  York.  Every  serious  student 
of  our  social  and  industrial  conditions  has  learned  to  look  with  discomfort 
and  alarm  upon  the  diminishing  part  which  churches  play  in  the  life  of  our 
great  cities — for  I  need  hardly  say  that  no  increase  in  the  number  of  fashion- 
able churches  and  of  wealthy  congregations  in  any  shape  or  way  atones  for 
the  diminution  in  the  number  of  the  churches  in  the  very  localities  where  there 
is  most  need  for  them.  If  ever  the  Christian  Church  ceases  to  be  the  church 
of  the  plain  people,  it  will  cease  to  be  the  Christian  Church. 

Dr.  Rainsford  has  stood  preeminent  among  the  clergymen  to  whom  it  has 
been  given  to  prevent  this  condition  of  things  from  obtaining.  His  remark- 
able physical  and  mental  equipment,  and  the  appeal  that  ethical  considera- 
tions make  to  him,  put  him  in  the  forefront  of  those  both  able  and  eager  to  do 
the  task.  He  was  keenly  alive  to  everything  that  appeals  to  men  as  men, 
and  his  broad  and  deep  sympathies  made  him  keenly  sensitive  to  the  need  of 
others,  no  less  than  to  the  way  in  which  these  needs  could  be  effectively  met. 
With  such  an  equipment,  he  took  an  empty  church  and  filled  it.  He  filled 
it  with  the  men  and  women  of  the  neighbourhood.  He  made  these  men  and 
women  feel  that  whether  they  were  rich  or  poor  mattered  nothing,  so  long 
as  they  were  Christians  who  tried  to  live  their  Christianity  in  a  spirit  of 
brotherly  love  and  of  sane,  cheerful  helpfulness  toward  themselves  and 
toward  one  another.  He  brought  the  church  close  to  the  busy,  working  life  of 
a  great  city.  With  his  strong  human  hand  he  felt  the  throbbing  pulse  of  the 
people  among  whom  he  worked,  and  he  fired  their  hearts  with  the  spirit  that 
was  in  his  own.  As  a  preacher,  as  an  executive,  as  a  citizen  among  his 
fellow-citizens,  Dr.  Rainsford  made  St.  George's  Church  the  most  notable 
institution  of  its  kind  in  the  world.  He  did  lasting  work  for  social  and 
civic  righteousness.  Not  only  New  York  City  but  the  Nation  as  a  whole 
owes  him  a  debt  of  gratitude  for  his  moulding  of  American  citizenship  in 
the  form  in  which  it  should  be  cast.  The  kind  of  citizenship  for  the  up- 
building of  which  he  laboured,  is  that  which  rests  its  sense  of  duty  to  city 
and  country  on  the  deep  and  broad  foundation  of  the  eternal  laws  of  spiritual 
well-being. 

I  keenly  regret  Dr.  Rainsford's  retirement  from  active  duty,  and  I 
welcome  this  book  as  giving  a  record  of  a  life  work  full  of  inspiration  for 


4o2  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

his  fellow-men.     To  Dr.  Rainsford  can  be  applied  the  words  of  the  German 
poet: 

Wer  nicht  gelitten,  hat  nur  halb  gelebt; 
Wer  nicht  gefehlt,  hat  wohl  auch  nicht  gestrebt; 
Wer  nicht  geweint,  hat  halt  auch  nur  gelacht; 
Wer  nie  gezweifelt,  hat  wohl  kaum  gedacht!1 

(Signed)  Theodore  Roosevelt. 
The  White  House, 

Washington,  D.  C. 
April  7th,  1906. 

The  first  time  I  spent  an  afternoon  and  evening  alone  with 
him  was  in  1904.     His  letter  of  invitation  is  characteristic: 

Dear  Dr.  Rainsford, — 

Is  there  any  chance  of  your  being  in  Washington  at  any  time  within  the 
next  few  weeks?  I  should  particularly  like  to  see  you.  If  you  can  come 
down,  will  you  not  let  me  know  in  advance,  so  that  I  can  arrange  to  have  you 
to  lunch  or  dinner?  Moreover,  if  you  will  bring  some  rough  clothes,  and  if 
you  are  willing  to  take  a  slow  walk  with  a  President  who,  like  Mr.  Tracy 
Tupman,  has  become  both  old  and  fat,  I  should  like  to  take  you  down  Rock 
Creek,  where,  if  you  go  on  the  footpath,  and  not  on  the  carriage  road,  the 
scenery  is  really  beautiful. 

Sincerely  yours, 
Feb.  12,  1904.  Theodore  Roosevelt. 

I  answered,  saying  I  could  go  to  Washington  on  the  23rd, 
and  place  myself  at  his  service.  That  I  feared  I  was  in  no  con- 
dition to  join  him  in  a  "Tracy  Tupman  walk,"  but  I  would  do 
my  best.    There  came  a  reply. 

Feb.  15,  1904.    ; 
Will  you  dine  with  me  on  the  23rd,  and  spend  the  night?     Can  you  get  here 
early  enough  to  go  for  a  walk  with  me,  say  about  3:30?     And  then  after  din- 
ner we  will  have  the  evening  to  discuss  matters.     I  think  I  shall  get  Taft  to 
come  to  dinner. 

Faithfully  yours, 
Theodore  Roosevelt. 

(Mr.  Taft  could  not  come.) 

I  arrived  on  time,  and  found  the  President  and  Senator 
Lodge  ready  for  a  walk.     We  drove  to  the  park  in  a  light  wagon, 

Who  has  not  suffered,  has  lived  but  half; 
Who  has  not  failed,  has  sure  not  striven; 
Who  has  not  wept,  has  forsooth  but  laughed; 
Who  has  not  doubted,  has  hardly  thought! 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  403 

left  it  at  the  gate,  and  made  for  the  bed  of  the  ravine,  down 
which,  in  moderate  flood,  for  there  had  been  a  semi-thaw,  the 
stream  ran.  It  was  a  clear,  cold  winter  day,  and  here  and  there 
new  ice  fringed  the  bank. 

Presently  the  gorge  opened,  the  stream  widened,  and  in 
front  of  us,  on  the  opposite  bank,  the  cliff  rose  precipitately, 
presenting  a  face  of  rock  ribbed  with  ice  and  snow. 

"Can  we  do  it?"  said  the  man  who  had  proclaimed  himself 
"both  old  and  fat." 

I  was  not  at  all  sure  that  I  could  do  it,  and  a  side  glance  at  the 
Senator  showed  me  very  plainly  that  he  was  even  more  un- 
certain of  his  powers  than  I  was.  However,  I  had  not  come 
from  New  York  to  go  back  on  my  host's  challenge  (for  that  was 
what  it  was)  so  I  said  I'd  try  to  continue  a  habit  I  had  con- 
tracted for  some  years  past  of  following  him,  and  waving  an 
adieu  to  the  Senator,  we  waded  across  that  icy  stream. 

The  cliff  is  a  scrambling  climb  in  summer  time.  In  winter, 
with  slippery  surface,  and  hand  and  foot-hold  very  uncertain  by 
reason  of  frost  and  thaw,  it  required  care  and  effort.  I  can- 
not remember  the  exact  height.  The  President,  of  course, 
chose  the  highest  and  steepest  face,  but  I  do  know  that  when 
at  last  I  gained  the  top,  it  was  with  a  sense  of  genuine  relief. 

There  was  small  opportunity  for  conversation  during  the  next 
two  hours,  for  we  went  straight  across  country  at  a  slashing 
gait,  and  the  pace  was  altogether  too  fast  for  talk.  We  got 
back  to  the  White  House  just  in  time  for  dinner. 

I  have  in  all  thirty-nine  notes  and  letters  received  between 
1899  and  1 91 8;  a  few  are,  I  think,  important  enough  to  enter 
here. 

In  December,  1902,  most  of  the  men  of  influence  I  knew  were 
bitterly  opposed  to  the  man  and  his  policies.  The  future 
proved  Theodore  Roosevelt  to  have  been  absolutely  right  and 
wise  in  what  he  did  and  tried  to  do.  His  stand  was  that  of  a 
great  man  who  saw  the  nation's  danger,  and  taking  his  political 
future  (which  was  rightly  dear  to  him)  in  his  hands,  unflinch- 
ingly, without  one  particle  of  compromise,  he  faced  the  storm. 
It  is  a  sad  thing  to  have  to  confess  it,  but  it  must  be  con- 
fessed with  all  plainness  that  many  good  men,  patriotic  in 
intention,  up  to  their  lights,  were  by  their  action  undermining 
the  very  foundations  of  democratic  government.     Some  con- 


4o4  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

fess  now,  who  could  not  see  it  then,  that  a  number  of  those  who 
controlled  the  wealth  of  the  United  States  had  persuaded  them- 
selves into  the  habit  of  belief  that  what  they  wanted  to  do  they 
could  do,  and  that  they  were  advancing  their  country's  for- 
tunes, as  well  as  their  own,  by  doing  it. 

They  were  law-abiding,  according  to  their  own  belief,  but 
when  the  law  thwarted  their  purposes,  they  depended  on  astute 
lawyers  to  steer  them  round  the  law  or  venal  politicians  to 
tamper  with  it.  Some  such  men  I  knew.  Moved  by  what  I 
heard  and  saw  among  such,  I  wrote  a  long  letter  to  the  Presi- 
dent, in  December,  1902.  It  is  not  worth  quoting  the  whole  of 
it  here;  its  plea  was  that  he  should  force  on  Congress  the  issue 
of  "publicity  of  Trust  accounts."     I  said: 

Some  of  the  strongest  men  financially  in  the  East  believe  in  the  reasonable- 
ness and  the  great  need  of  this,  but  the  trouble  with  them  is  that,  while  they 
hold  this  opinion  individually,  they  are  loath  to  break  line,  and  they  won't 
go  back  on  each  other.  Give  them  a  lead.  It  is  the  business  of  the  Presi- 
dent of  the  United  States  to  give  them  a  lead.  I  don't  think  you  realize  how 
superb  are  your  chances  of  leadership,  and  how  faithful  to  that  leadership 
multitudes  of  people,  great  and  small,  are  at  this  moment  prepared  to  be. 

It  seems  to  me  there  was  an  element  of  ebb  and  flow  in  your  "message" — a 
talking  round  the  question,  that  somehow  missed  the  point.  ...  It 
seems  awfully  conceited  of  me  to  talk  in  this  way.  I  only  venture  on  it  be- 
cause I  know  you  to  be  a  man  so  big  of  soul,  so  kind  of  heart,  that  you  will 
not  misunderstand  even  a  blundering  effort  to  help  the  Great  Cause.     .     .     . 

With  affection  and  respect, 

Dec.  18, 190a.  W.  S.  R. 

My  letter  was  marked  "Personal  and  Private."  I  promptly 
got  the  castigation  I  deserved.  I  was  ignorant  of  those  proce- 
dures that  control  the  Executive. 

December  27,  1902. 
Personal. 
My  dear  Dr.  Rainsford: 

I  thank  you  for  your  letter.  You  say  it  is  difficult  for  the  politicians  in 
Washington  to  understand  what  is  needed  and  not  to  be  timid.  I  agree  with 
you.  But  one  of  my  main  difficulties  arises  from  the  fact  that  thoroughly 
good  outsiders  do  not  understand  what  is  possible  to  do,  or  indeed  what  is 
done.  I  am  glad  you  wrote  frankly  about  my  message.  I  know  you  expect 
me  to  write  with  equal  frankness  in  return.  Your  letter  was  a  genuine  dis- 
appointment to  me,  because  it  showed  you  had  misunderstood  what  most 
emphatically  no  man  has  a  right  to  misunderstand.     My  message  was  ab- 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  405 

solutely  clear.  I  spoke  of  the  need  of  publicity.  But  are  you  aware  that  to 
make  publicity  an  issue  is  mere  nonsense  unless  Congress  frames  legislation 
which  will  give  us  a  chance  to  get  it?  Are  you  aware  aiso  of  the  extreme  un- 
wisdom of  my  irritating  Congress  by  fixing  the  details  of  a  bill,  concerning 
which  they  are  very  sensitive,  instead  of  laying  down  the  general  policy? 
I  said  in  my  message  just  what  I  had  said  in  my  speeches,  only  I  used  the 
phraseology  appropriate  to  the  occasion.  I  went  over  every  word  with 
Attorney  General  Knox,  and  went  just  as  far  as  I  thought  we  could  with  safety 
^o.  He  and  I  are  now  in  close  consultation  with  the  Congressional  com- 
mittees having  the  legislation  in  charge. 

Don't  you  think  that  you  will  get  a  better  idea  of  what  I  am  after  if  you 
remember  that  I  am  seeking  to  secure  action  by  Congress  rather  than  to 
establish  a  reputation  as  a  stump  exhorter?  The  latter  is  a  good  course,  too: 
follow  it  at  times;  but  the  first  is  the  main  thing  now. 

Sincerely  yours, 

Theodore  Roosevelt. 

Dec.  29,  1902, 
Dear  Mr.  President, — 

I  know  you  are  rightly  seeking  to  secure  action  by  Congress  "  rather  than 
to  establish  a  reputation  as  a  stump  exhorter" — of  how  best  to  secure  such 
action  you  are  a  good  judge,  and  I  no  judge  at  all.  All  the  same,  I  hold  it 
can  do  no  harm  for  a  sincere  friend  to  point  out,  as  I  tried  to  do,  the  even  larger 
work  that  has  been  entrusted  to  you:  the  leadership  of  the  youth  of  this 
nation. 

That  leadership  you  have  won  not  by  "stump  exhortation,"  but  by  a  fine, 
high-minded  consistency,  and  the  following  of  a  moral  purpose  evident  to  all. 

May  God  grant  you  now  and  always,  courage  and  a  "sound  mind."  May 
you  and  Mrs.  Roosevelt  and  all  your  children  have  the  best  and  happiest  of 
New  Years. 

Very  sincerely  and  obediendy  yours, 

W.  S.  Rainsford. 

Dear  Dr.  Rainsford, — 

Of  course  it  is  always  a  pleasure  to  hear  from  you.  I  am  glad  to  have  you 
write  to  me  with  entire  frankness. 

Faithfully  yours, 

Theodore  Roosevelt. 

One  letter  written  during  the  rush  of  the  campaign  of  191 2  I 
must  here  give.  During  that  campaign  Theodore  Roosevelt 
rose  to  a  greater  height  than  any  he  had  yet  attained.  So  those 
of  his  friends  believed  who  stood  by  him.  So  the  majority  of 
the  Republican  voters  of  the  country  believed,  and  proved  their 
belief  by  voting  for  the  man  they  trusted,  though  behind  him  was 
no  party,  no  machine,  no  organization.     In  his  own  downright. 


4o6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

straightforward  way  he  stood  up  before  them,  and  won  out 
against  the  regular  machine.  Some  good  men  in  the  Republi- 
can party  "stood  by  the  ship,"  so  they  described  their  action, 
choosing  a  shaky  party  instead  of  a  steadfast  man. 

Many  of  us  who  are  not  politicians  but  who  have  tried  to  do 
our  political  duty  by  our  country,  who  have  tried  to  see  straight 
and  go  straight,  find  it  hard  to  forgive  "these  choosers  of  an 
old  ship";  and  hardest  of  all  to  forgive  one  of  the  chief  leaders 
of  that  party,  Elihu  Root. 

Surely  the  man  makes  the  ship,  rather  than  the  ship  the  man. 
Consequences  tragic  beyond  words,  world-wide  in  the  misery 
and  loss  they  wrought,  resulted  from  the  fatuous  choice  that 
preferred  to  stand  by  a  cranky  ship  rather  than  a  great  captain. 
If  Theodore  Roosevelt  had  been  elected  President  of  the  United 
States  in  1912,  as  was  the  will  of  a  majority  of  the  Republican 
voters  expressed  at  the  polls,  the  whole  history  of  the  world 
might  have  been  different.  There  might  have  been  no  war;  or, 
if  there  had  been,  most  surely  it  would  have  been  shorter  and 
millions  of  lives  would  have  been  saved. 

In  his  great  Carnegie  Hall  address  in  April,  191 2,  he  made 
perhaps  the  finest  appeal  he  ever  made  to  his  countrymen. 
After  it,  I  wrote  him  a  little  line.  Here  is  his  answer,  written 
from  the  Outlook  magazine  office: 

I  am  glad  you  liked  my  address.  I  think  you  would  have  liked  my  ad- 
dress at  Boston,  the  other  night.  In  this  campaign  I  have  been  able  to  take 
as  pronounced  a  stand  for  an  ideal  as  it  has  ever  been  my  good  fortune  to 
take  at  all.  In  a  wearyingly  large  number  of  cases  in  politics,  one  has  to 
accept  the  best  possible,  when  it  is  far  short  of  the  best.  In  this  campaign, 
however,  I  have  been  able  to  place  the  questions  just  as  they  ought  to  be 
placed,  and  I  think  we  have  conducted  it  upon  as  high  a  plane  as  ever  a 
campaign  in  America  has  been  conducted. 

In  great  haste,  faithfully  yours, 

April  30,  1912.  Theodore  Roosevelt. 

In  191 5  there  was  the  Barnes  trial,  and  I  felt  called  to  write 
a  letter  to  my  leader  that  I  was  sure  no  one  among  his  many 
friends  would  venture  to  write.  Not  that  I  was  intimate  with 
him  as  were  some  others,  but  that,  ever  since  he  had  been  Gov- 
ernor of  the  State,  I  had  consistently  tried  to  help  him  in  the 
only  way  I  could,  by  letting  him  see  what  enemies  or  half- 
hearted friends  were  saying  or  doing.     From  experience  I  know 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  407 

well  that  this  sort  of  help  is  the  hardest  to  get  or  to  give,  and 
is  often  misunderstood  and  resented.  But  by  now  I  knew  that 
my  friend  knew  that  I  might  be  stupidly  mistaken  or  wrong- 
headed,  but  that  I  loved  and  honoured  him. 

The  only  important  thing  in  my  letter  I  here  briefly  state: 

You  are  going  to  meet  a  hostile  crowd.  Your  enemies  will  be  there.  They 
will  catch  at  any  opportunity  to  hurt  you.  They  will  do  what  they  can  to 
make  you  appear  to  the  world  to  be  the  sort  of  man  they  have  always  de- 
clared you  to  be.  You  know  what  they  accuse  you  of  being.  Let  me  re- 
mind you.    As  you  face  them  remember  it  well. 

(Then,  categorically,  I  named  three  popular  accusations.) 

(1)  You  call  all  men  who  differ  from  you  liars. 

(2)  You  want  everything  for  yourself. 

(3)  You  never  admit  you  are  wrong. 

W.  S.  Rainsford. 

The  answer  touched  me  to  the  heart.  It  is  humble  and  beau- 
tiful and  true.  It  should  find,  it  will  find,  a  place  in  the  his- 
tory, at  some  future  day  to  be  written,  of  Theodore  Roose- 
velt: 

Oyster  Bay, 
April  10,  19 1 5. 
My  dear  Dr.  Rainsford, — 

That  is  an  awfully  nice  letter!  I  must  thank  you  for  it,  and  I  am  going 
to  try  to  show  my  appreciation  by  not  using  the  hard  language  of  which  you 
complain  any  more. 

It  is  awfully  difficult  to  strike  just  the  middle  between  a  sappy  refusal, 
even  to  condemn  wrong  in  the  concrete,  which  is  one  of  the  failings  of  our 
public  men,  and  the  overstrained  violence  that  defeats  its  own  ends. 

With  renewed  thanks, 

Always  faithfully  yours, 

Theodore  Roosevelt. 

Years  after  that  trial,  see  William  Barnes's  own  plea  to 
Theodore  Roosevelt  to  accept  the  nomination  of  the  Republican 
party  to  be  Governor  of  the  State.  There  is  nothing  more  re- 
markable in  our  political  history: 

I  signed  a  call  addressed  to  Theodore  Roosevelt  to  enter  the  Republican 
primary  as  candidate  for  Governor — because  we  require,  above  all  else,  in  the 
highest  affairs  of  trust  and  power,  not  only  men  of  integrity,  but  men  who 


4o8  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

can  see  into  the  future,  who  could  not  be  content  with  doing  only  these  things 
which  become  obviously  necessary. — Had  this  nation  been  led  by  vision  the 
war  would  have  been  already  won. — Statement  by  Wm.  Barnes,  July  19, 
191 8.     See  "Theodore  Roosevelt  and  His  Times, "  Vol  ii,  page  453. 

In  1916,  I  begged  Roosevelt  not  to  go  to  South  America.  I 
had  had  personal  knowledge  of  one  or  two  who  had  travelled  in 
its  wilder  regions.  I  dreaded  for  him  its  fever.  Theodore 
Roosevelt  had  never  spared  himself.  His  physique  had  been 
magnificent,  but  he  had  made  heavy  draughts  on  his  superb 
stores  of  vitality.  He  was  reckless  in  the  use  of  himself.  No 
persuasion  would  make  him  take  common  care  of  himself. 
This  I  knew  too  well,  for  Cunningham,  a  good  friend  of  mine, 
who  had  been  his  guide  in  Africa,  explained  to  me  what  trouble 
the  President  put  him  to  during  those  months.  Ordinary 
precautions  he  would  not  bother  to  take.  From  a  very  ex- 
tended experience  of  my  own  I  knew  how  much  depends,  in  a 
country  where  climatic  conditions  are  bad,  on  taking  not  only 
ordinary,  but  extraordinary,  precautions — planning  beforehand 
for  the  right  sort  of  food,  etc.,  etc.,  etc.;  going  to  considerable 
expense,  if  necessary,  to  secure  things  that,  to  the  careless 
or  ignorant,  might  seem  scarcely  worth  troubling  about  at 
all. 

Even  if  he  had  been  well,  he  should  not  have  gone  to  South 
America.  And  he  was  not  well.  The  fierce  campaign  had 
worn  him  down,  and  he  was  temporarily  discouraged.  He  was 
very  far  from  realizing  the  immense  impression  he  had  made  on 
the  whole  country.  I  don't  think  that  to  the  very  end  of  his 
life  he  fully  understood  that  it  was  he  who  had  led  the  people 
to  war.  No!  What  he  felt  he  said  to  me:  "The  people  are 
tired  of  me." 

When  it  seemed  likely  that  we  would  enter  the  war,  and  there 
was  a  possibility  of  his  raising  (not  commanding;  he  never 
asked  for  or  expected  any  command  higher  than  Brigadier)  a 
a  special  volunteer  division,  I  wrote,  asking  to  be  remembered, 
saying  I  wanted  to  go  as  a  chaplain. 

In  March,  191 7,  I  received  the  following  letter.  It  is  in  his 
own  handwriting.  Most  of  his  letters  were  written  by  a  secre- 
tary, and  signed  by  him : 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  409 

Sagamore  Hill,  Mar.  6,  1917. 
Dear  Doctor, — 

As  usual,  your  letter  gives  me  real  pleasure.  Indeed,  if  I  am  allowed  to 
raise  a  division,  I  should  peculiarly  like  to  have  you  as  one  of  the  chaplains. 
But,  as  you  say,  I  fear  there  is  no  such  luck  ahead. 

Wilson  prepares  for  war  with  Germany  essentially  on  the  principle  of  the 
school  boy  who  prepares  for  trouble  with  his  teacher  by  putting  a  geography 
in  the  seat  of  his  trousers. 

I  am  glad  you  find  a  growth  in  the  national  spirit.  But  it  is  a  very  slow 
growth.  The  hideous  wrong  that  Wilson  has  done  the  American  spirit  has 
been  to  drug  it,  to  stultify  it.  I  make  no  apology  for  our  lamentable  spiritual 
falling  off,  which  has  permitted  him  to  do  this.  But  after  all,  good,  simple, 
hardworking  people,  such  as  those  who  necessarily  compose  the  immense 
majority  of  our  population,  cannot  be  expected  to  think  out  international 
questions  for  themselves.  They  must  have  a  leader;  and  normally  they  will 
accept  the  President  as  that  leader.  When,  by  a  multitude  of  adroit  and 
shifting  speeches  and  gestures,  he  bewilders  them  until  they  do  not  know  what 
has  really  happened,  it  is  hard  to  blame  them  for  following  his  lead  into  what 
they  are  told  is  safety. 

The  men  I  blame  are  the  professional  intellectuals,  the  professional  moral- 
ists of  the  Evening  Post,  Springfield  Republican,  New  Republic,  and  Atlantic 
Monthly  type. 

I  hope  Mrs.  Rainsford  gets  some  benefit  from  the  quiet. 

Always  yours, 

Theodore  Roosevelt. 

Congress  voted  Theodore  Roosevelt  his  division.  It  is  no 
exaggeration  to  say  all  Europe  cried  out  for  the  presence  of  the 
man  they  had  learned  to  trust  and  honour.  Clemenceau  wrote 
a  long  personal  letter  to  President  Wilson.  "Your  troops  are 
coming,  but  where  is  Roosevelt?  My  poilus  are  crying  to  me, 
'Give  us  Roosevelt.'" 

The  sending  of  the  Roosevelt  Division  was  blocked  by  Presi- 
dent Wilson. 

In  May,  I  wrote,  trying  to  say  partly  what  I  felt,  for  I  knew 
well  that  the  refusal  of  his  services  pretty  well  broke  his  heart. 
His  message  to  the  men  who  wanted  to  follow  him  to  France 
was  fine  as  anything  he  ever  said  or  wrote  in  its  manly  dignity 
and  its  utter  unselfishness.  It  was  worthy  of  a  great  leader  on 
a  great  day. 

(In  his  own  handwriting  )  Sagamore  Hill, 

May  24,  1917. 
Dear  Rainsford, — 

I  have  received  many,  many  letters  I  valued  during  the  last  few  days 
but  none  I  valued  more  than  yours.     Well!    You  and  I  did  our  best  to  be 


4io  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

allowed  to  render  service  which  we  could  have  rendered;  we  were  denied 
the  privilege,  and  now  we  must  do  the  best  we  can  anyhow. 

It  is  not  pleasant  to  try  and  fight  a  great  war  under  the  lead  of  a  Buchanan; 
but  there  is  no  alternative,  and  of  course  our  country  is  all  that  we  have  in 
mind. 

Ever  faithfully  yours, 

Theodore  Roosevelt. 

When  his  son  Quentin  was  killed,  I  wrote  to  him: 

Ridgefield,  Conn. 
Sept.  20,  191 8. 
Dear  Leader, — 

I  must  thank  you  from  my  heart  for  your  article  "The  Great  Adventure." 
There  you  strike,  may  I  say,  a  deeper,  holier  note  than  in  anything  of  yours 
so  far  as  I  know,  written.  The  iron  has  entered  your  soul,  and  you  are  speak- 
ing to  the  millions  whose  souls  it  has  entered,  or  must  enter,  before  this  can- 
cerous thing,  threatening  the  race's  life,  has  been  cut  out. 

The  supreme  mystery  and  tragedy  of  life  you  face,  and,  facing  it,  you  speak 
to  all  of  us.  Not  to  those  only  who  still  retain  the  vastly  comforting  assur- 
ance that  at  the  other  side  the  veil  their  loved  ones,  glorified,  are  awaiting 
them,  but  also  to  the  multitudes  of  thoughtful  men  and  women  who,  having 
surrendered  at  least  certitude  on  that  point,  still,  with  a  self-sacrifice  and  faith 
in  the  worth-whileness  of  life,  as  high  and  as  holy  as  this  poor  world  has  ever 
seen,  "go  forth  to  their  work  until  the  evening." 

The  Master  of  us  all  said,  long  ago,  that  "the  Comforter  had  many  things 
to  say  to  us."     His  message  changes  as  the  ages  pass,  but  he  is  with  us  still. 

May  he  abide  with  you,  dear  friend,  and  with  your  wife. 

Gratefully  yours, 

W.  S.  Rains  ford. 

The  Kansas  City  Star, 

Oct.  3,  1918. 
My  dear  Doctor, — 

Your  letter  touches  me.  I  thank  you  for  it.  In  it  you  show,  I  think,  that 
you  and  I  have  really  at  heart  the  same  creed,  a  creed  I  never  have  spoken  to 
you  about.     Give  my  heartiest  regards  to  your  gallant  boy. 

Theodore  Roosevelt. 

One  last  short  line  I  had,  just  before  the  end,  dated  Janu- 
ary 1,  1 91 9.  He  said  he  had  had  much  pain,  but  he  was  getting 
better,  and  then  added:  "Well,  our  boys  did  their  duty,  as  their 
mothers  and  fathers  would  have  wished  them  to  do." 

Well!  We  loved  him,  that  Greatheart  of  our  time!  And 
many,  many  of  us  would  have  gladly  died  in  his  place,  if  by  our 
dying  he  might  have  lived  on,  once  more  to  guide  and  rule  the 
land  he  loved. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 
Four  Dinners 

Love  will  put  a  new  face  on  the  weary  old  world,  in  which  we  have  dwelt 
as  pagans  and  enemies  too  long. — R.  W.  Emerson. 

We  climb  like  corals,  grave  by  grave, 
That  have  a  pathway  sunward. 

— Gerald  Massey. 

Gerald  Massey,  whose  fine  brave  insight  into  the  ways  of 
God  the  two  lines  I  quote  illustrate,  is  known  to  few.  He  was 
one  of  that  great  little  band  whose  faith  and  courage  saved 
England  in  the  early  years  of  the  Nineteenth  Century.  He 
was  the  poet  of  the  poor.  "I  worked,"  said  he,  "in  a  silk  mill 
when  I  was  eight  years  old,  from  five  in  the  morning  till  six- 
thirty  in  the  evening,  for  a  weekly  wage,  beginning  at  nine- 
pence,  raised  to  one  shilling  and  threepence.  That  was  in 
1830.  Happily  a  fire  destroyed  that  mill,  and  I  and  a  number 
of  other  children  stood  for  hours  in  wind  and  sleet  and  mud, 
watching  joyfully  the  blaze  that  set  us  free.  I  had  no  childhood. 
Ever  since  I  can  remember  I  had  an  aching  fear  of  want  throb- 
bing in  heart  and  brow."  Yet  this  was  the  man  whose  splendid 
faith  is  certain  of  the  "pathway  sunward." 

The  "aching  fear  of  want,"  its  deadening,  hope-destroying 
power  in  the  home  life  of  many  millions  of  the  poor,  I  began  to 
realize  when  I  was  a  boy.  I  saw  it  in  crowded  East  London. 
It  followed  me  in  the  less  huddled  but  scarcely  less  poverty- 
stricken  courts  of  old  Norwich,  where  thousands  of  beaten 
shoemakers  were  making  a  last  vain  effort  to  compete  with 
modern  machinery-made  footwear.  And  after  a  few  years' 
interval,  I  faced  it  again,  in  the  intolerably  wicked  conditions 
of  New  York  sweatshops  and  tenement  house  life. 

Any  intelligent  man  must  see  that  such  poverty  must  de- 

411 


4i2  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

base  and  degrade.  I  ask  myself  the  question :  How  was  it  that 
every  decent  man  and  woman  did  not  see  this;  see  it  so  clearly 
as  to  feel  compelled  to  leave  other  things  that  interfered,  and 
set  themselves  to  the  undoing  of  the  horror  of  it  ?  There  is  an 
answer.  Christians  had  not  realized  that  in  the  scheme  of  their 
universe  man  is  his  own  saviour.  Most  do  not  realize  it  now. 
We  somehow  pictured  to  ourselves  a  complacent  sort  of  God 
that  approved  things  as  they  were.  We  were  the  fortunate 
ones;  and  if  so,  noblesse  oblige  naturally  was  our  motto.  But 
that  was  a  very  different  matter  from  "bearing  other's  bur- 
dens in  order  to  fulfill  the  Law  of  Christ."  (Gal.  vi,  2.)  A 
very  different  matter  from  raising  our  fellows  on  the  low 
mounds  of  our  forgotten  graves,  as  Gerald  Massey  saw  man- 
kind raised. 

Yes !  Massey  was  a  truer  prophet  of  God,  when  he  wrote  for 
the  Chartist  rioters  of  the  1830's,  than  all  the  bishops  and  all 
the  priests  of  the  Church  of  England.  The  spirit  of  human 
progress  and  salvation  was  with  the  Chartists  rather  than  with 
His  Majesty's  government  and  the  English  Church.  The 
Chartists  made  mistakes.  All  reformers  are  human,  or  they 
would  not  be  effective.  They  were  the  first  beginners  of 
modern  labour  unity.  They  claimed  a  larger  share  in  the 
product  of  industry  for  the  rank  and  file  of  labour's  great 
army. 

The  mistakes  of  early  Chartism  have  been  forgotten.  The 
mistakes  of  our  labour  unionism  will  some  day  be  forgotten,  too. 
But  the  aims  of  neither  will  be  forgotten  nor  baffled,  for  they 
are  just  and  righteous  and  certain  to  be  achieved.  Labour  must 
have  a  far  larger  share  in  the  profits  of  its  industry.  Assure  it 
of  this,  and  it  will  be  more  efficient  and  industrious.  And  so 
the  twin  curse  of  stunted  childhood  and  undeserved  want, 
that  have  for  so  long  scarred  the  lives  of  the  poor,  shall  no 
longer,  like  the  sword  of  Damocles,  hang  suspended  over  the 
labouring  man's  home. 

Mr.  Roosevelt  had  filled  President  McKinley's  unexpired 
term  for  three  and  a  half  years.  In  those  years  he  had  made 
history.  He  had  spoken  to  the  coloured  citizen  the  first  word 
of  honest,  straightforward  encouragement  that  his  race  had 
heard  since  Lincoln  was  shot.  He  had  carried  through  the 
"Taxing  public  franchise  law"  against  fiercest  opposition — 


FOUR  DINNERS  413 

T 

opposition  in  which,  alas!  many  of  the  rich  men  in  the  coun- 
try joined.  And  he  had  won  the  Northern  Securities  suit. 
In  1902,  he  took  the  unprecedented  step  of  forcing  a  settlement 
of  the  coal  strike  that  threatened  the  nation  with  dire  calamity. 
Everyone,  friend  and  enemy,  told  him  he  was  committing 
political  suicide.  But  Roosevelt  saw  the  matter  through, 
and  the  nation  blessed  a  great  leader. 

In  1903,  he  broke  up  the  political  gang  of  land  thieves  in 
Oregon,  made  open  warfare  on  the  two  Senators  of  that  state, 
and  his  policy,  relentlessly  pursued,  sent  one  of  them  to  the 
penitentiary. 

In  the  beginning  of  1904,  Elihu  Root  came  to  New  York, 
to  speak  in  defence  of  the  administration.  As  everyone  knows, 
Root  for  very  many  years  had  been  Senator  Piatt's  admirer  and 
henchman,  and  had  performed  a  similar  office  for  others,  whom 
it  is  not  necessary  again  to  name,  but,  alas!  still  in  our  city, 
(though  happily  "they  rest  from  their  labours,")  "their  works 
do  follow  them." 

Everyone  was  glad  to  welcome  Mr.  Root  back  to  New 
York.  "Glad  to  see  you,  but  leave  the  Administration  alone; 
if  you  don't,  you  will  raise  hell."  "Well,  then,  I  am  come  to 
raise  particular  hell,"  said  Root.  For  in  two  speeches,  one  in 
Chicago  and  the  other  in  New  York,  he  defended  Roosevelt's 
policy  and  practice  as  no  other  advocate  in  the  United  States 
could  have  defended  them. 

Judge  John  Clinton  Grey  gave  Mr.  Root  a  dinner  the  night 
after  his  New  York  speech,  and  I  was  honoured  by  an  invita- 
tion. The  dinner  was  both  pleasant  and  good,  as  were  all  din- 
ners where  Judge  Grey  was  host.  As  I  remember,  we  sat 
down  about  twenty.  I  waited  for  a  chance,  and  when  it  came, 
late  in  the  evening,  I  said:  "Mr.  Root,  I  want  to  say  that 
though  I  have  been  fortunate  in  hearing  many  good  speeches 
since  I  lived  in  New  York,  I  think  last  night's  was  the  very  best 
I  ever  heard." 

"Thank  you,  Doctor  Rainsford;  that  is  kind  of  you." 

"Now  let  me  say  something  else,"  I  persisted,  and  I  felt 
silence  round  me.  "Mr.  Root,  I  don't  think  you  could  have 
made  that  speech  a  few  years  ago." 

Mr.  Root  met  my  challenge  finely.  "I  am  more  glad  of 
your  second  statement,"  said  he,  "than  of  your  first.     You  are 


4i4  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

right.  I  could  not  have  made  that  speech  if  I  had  not  worked 
with  and  worked  under  Theodore  Roosevelt." 

It  was  nobly  said,  but  so  bitter  was  the  feeling  against  Roose- 
velt then,  among  the  crowd  of  rich  men  and  Republican  poli- 
ticians in  the  city,  that  it  drew  forth  no  applause  whatever  at 
Judge  Grey's  dinner  table. 

In  November,  shortly  after  Roosevelt's  election,  Mr.  John 
Morley  came  as  a  visitor  for  some  days  to  the  White  House. 
On  the  last  evening  of  his  visit  the  President  gave  him  a  dinner, 
and  to  it  I  had  the  honour  to  receive  by  telegram  an  invitation. 
I  reached  Washington  in  the  evening,  and  got  to  the  White 
House  only  half  an  hour  before  dinner  time.  The  President 
met  me  in  the  hall.  "We  will  have  an  interesting  time;  you 
will  enjoy  your  company."  Naturally  I  had  not  the  least  idea 
what  shape  the  dinner  would  take.  My  invitation  simply  ran, 
"to  meet  John  Morley." 

All  the  company,  fourteen  or  fifteen,  came  in  pretty  well 
together.  One  of  the  first  was  a  tall  priest,  one  of  the  Paulist 
Fathers  from  New  York;  I  cannot  remember  his  name.  Then 
Carrol  D.  Wright,  Commissioner  of  Labour,  with  whom  I  had 
served  on  the  Committee  of  Fifty  on  the  liquor  question  for 
many  years;  Secretary  Morton,  Sargent,  Commissioner  of 
Immigration,  Stone,  Hannahan,  Clark,  Morrisy,  chiefs  of  the 
following  Brotherhoods  respectively:  Locomotive  Engineers, 
Firemen,  Conductors,  and  Trainmen;  Fuller,  who  was  legisla- 
tive agent  of  those  Brotherhoods;  James  R.  Garfield;  and 
Joseph  Bucklin  Bishop,  then  editor  of  the  Commercial  Adver- 
tiser. I  think  John  Mitchell  was  there,  too,  but  I  am  not  sure. 
(Mr.  Garfield  has  kindly  assisted  my  poor  memory  in  making 
the  list.) 

The  dinner  was  soon  over.  The  President  hurried  things 
along.  He  had,  by  the  way,  one  bad  dinner  habit.  He  was  a 
big,  careless  eater.  He  persistently  "rushed"  his  food.  I 
remember,  years  after,  Cunningham,  whose  devotion  to  the 
President,  whose  wide  knowledge  of  African  conditions  (and,  on 
one  occasion,  whose  fine  courage  and  equally  fine  shooting 
saved  Mr.  Roosevelt  in  a  moment  of  great  peril)  made  his  trip 
the  great  success  it  was,  said  to  me:  "Why,  Doctor,  he  eats 
twice  as  much  meat  as  an  ordinary  man,  and  twice  as  fast,  and 
then  he  sits  up  half  the  night  writing." 


FOUR  DINNERS  415 

Well,  the  table  was  cleared,  and  the  Secret  Service  man  placed 
outside  the  dining-room  door.  Then  the  President  rose  and 
said,  as  nearly  as  I  can  remember: 

"I  have  wanted  to  give  this  dinner  for  three  years.  I  could 
not  give  it  before,  because  people  would  say  I  was  seeking  votes. 
They  can't  [with  his  own  chuckle]  say  that  now.  Mr.  Morley 
has  been  staying  with  me.  I  told  him  of  my  desire,  and  he  has 
kindly  allowed  me  to  give  the  dinner  as  a  courtesy  to  himself. 
Now  you,  each  one  of  you,  are  my  friends.  You  are  each  of 
you  men  who  have,  in  your  own  several  ways,  won  some  special 
knowledge  of  our  country.  You  are  men  I  trust.  To- 
night, I  have  called  you  together,  not  merely  to  meet  Mr.  Mor- 
ley, whom  we  all  wish  to  honour,  but  to  help  and  advise  me." 

Then,  with  evident  and  deep  feeling,  the  President  said: 
"Gentlemen,  I  have  great  problems  before  me.  We  are  living 
in  momentous  times.  And  God  is  my  witness,  I  want  to  do 
what  is  wise  and  right  by  the  people  of  this  country,  who  have 
elected  me  their  president  by  so  great  a  majority  vote.  Spe- 
cially, I  must  face  three  problems: 

"  1.     Control  of  the  Trusts. 

"  2.  How  to  increase  the  powers  of  the  Railroad  Commission 
and  stop  rebating. 

"3.     Government  by  Injunction. 

"  I  will  not  speak  to-night  on  any  of  these.  But  I  have  asked 
you  men  whom  I  know  and  trust  to  come  here  and  tell  me  what 
you  think  the  President  of  the  United  States  can  and  ought  to 
do  to  solve  them  for  the  public  good.  Let  each  man  speak  out 
his  mind.     Do  not  hurry;  you  have  the  night  before  you." 

The  President  did  not  rise  till  after  one  o'clock.  Now  and 
then  he  asked  a  question,  or  called  on  someone  to  speak.  Ex- 
cept to  do  these,  he  never  opened  his  lips.  I  thought  the  dis- 
cussion was  very  able  and  very  frank;  and  though  there  was 
wide  difference  of  opinion,  no  one  lost  his  temper. 

The  invitation  to  that  dinner  was  the  greatest  honour  ever 
done  me.  It  was  an  extraordinarily  interesting  and  inspiring 
occasion.  When  it  was  over,  I  was  so  tired  that  I  did  not  sit  up 
as  usual  and  make  notes.  What  was  said  was  important,  but 
the  real  significance  of  that  night  was  the  revealing  light  it  cast 
on  the  great  President's  way  of  going  about  his  tasks.  All  he 
had  and  all  he  was,  was  at  the  service  of  mankind. 


4i6  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Nothing  written  about  Theodore  Roosevelt  since  then  is 
truer  or  finer  than  Kipling's  lines: 

Hard-schooled  by  long  power, 

Yet  most  humble  of  mind 
Where  aught  that  he  was 

Might  advantage  mankind. 
Leal  servant,  loved  master, 

Rare  comrade,  sure  guide     . 
Oh,  our  world  is  none  the  safer 

Now  Great-Heart  hath  died! 

Mr.  Morley  and  I  were  the  only  men  of  the  party  who  slept 
that  night  in  the  White  House.  The  President  breakfasted 
next  morning  in  his  own  room,  and  Mr.  Morley  and  I  break- 
fasted together.  Of  course  I  had  to  put  to  Gladstone's  great 
lieutenant  the  usual  questions. 

"How  do  you  like  what  you  have  seen  of  us?" 
"Have  seen  two  wonderful  things:  Niagara  Falls  and  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt." 

"And  how  did  last  night's  dinner  impress  you?" 

"Well,  I  would  to  God  we  could  have  it  in  Downing  Street." 

Between  this  dinner  and  the  next  I  shall  tell  of  eight  years 
elapsed.  Meanwhile,  the  spirit  of  utter  fairness  and  the  policy 
of  a  square  deal  for  both  Labour  and  Capital,  that,  in  season  and 
out  of  season,  Theodore  Roosevelt  had  preached  and  practised 
in  the  face  of  day — the  spirit  that  made  that  night  in  which  he 
called  a  few  of  his  friends  to  council  an  unforgettable  night — 
had  begun  to  leaven  the  whole  land. 

One  quite  extraordinary  instance  of  its  working  I  had  in- 
timate knowledge  of.  It  is  well  worth  recalling.  Our  memo- 
ries are  too  short,  and  events  that  should  be  unforgettable  are 
too  often  swallowed  up  and  smothered  in  the  mass  of  stuff  with 
which  the  daily  press  is  gorged. 

During  the  garment  workers'  struggle  for  better  condi- 
tions, I  came  into  touch  with  an  inconspicuous  sort  of  man,  J.  E. 
Williams,  who  impressed  me  as  being  singularly  clear  headed 
and  clean  hearted.  I  received  a  letter  from  him,  giving  details 
of  the  Cherry  Mine  disaster,  on  November  13,  1909,  in  which 
two  hundred  and  fifty-eight  persons,  including  ten  rescuers, 
were  killed  in  a  few  minutes,  suffocated,  sealed  in  a  burning  pit. 


FOUR  DINNERS  417 

One  hundred  and  sixty  women  were  left  widows  and  four 
hundred  and  seventy  children  fatherless.  Of  these,  four 
hundred  and  seven  were  under  fourteen  years  of  age — by  law 
too  young  to  work. 

The  mine  was  owned  by  the  St.  Paul  Coal  Company.  That 
company  was  practically  dependent  on  the  Chicago,  Mil- 
waukee &  St.  Paul  Railway  Company,  to  which  company 
the  Cherry  Mine  yielded  coal.  So,  apart  from  the  railroad 
company,  the  mine  had  small  value. 

J.  E.  Williams  was  no  longer  a  labour  leader.  He  had  re- 
tired to  Streator,  111.,  where  the  Cherry  Mine  was,  and  was 
manager  of  the  Plum  Opera  House  there.  He  had  himself 
been  a  miner;  he  knew  thoroughly  the  facts;  he  sized  up  the 
extent  of  the  disaster,  and  quietly,  this  one  man,  a  self-ap- 
pointed mediator,  went  to  work  to  save  the  half-crazed  camp. 
What  followed  is  a  great  story,  but  too  long  for  me  to  tell  here 
except  in  outline. 

Williams  went  directly  to  Chicago,  and  sought  an  interview 
with  President  Earling,  of  the  Chicago,  Milwaukee  &  St.  Paul 
Railway  Company.  He  actually  asked  for  two  hours  of  the 
President's  time,  I  believe!  That  time  was  given.  Mr.  Earl- 
ing listened  with  attention  and  sympathy,  and  at  the  end  said: 

"I  admit  a  moral  obligation.  What  I  can  do  with  my  di- 
rectors I  do  not  know." 

Mr.  Williams  wrote  to  me,  asking  me  to  ask  Mr.  Morgan  to 
use  any  influence  he  might  have  to  induce  the  directors  of  that 
railroad  to  do  what  of  course  there  was  no  legal  claim  on  them 
whatever  to  do,  viz. :  give  money  out  of  the  funds  of  the  great 
railroad  company  of  which  they  were  directors  to  pension  the 
widows  and  orphans  of  the  men  who  had  met  death  in  a  mine 
whose  fortunes  they  absolutely  controlled  but  did  not  legally 
own. 

I  met  Mr.  Morgan  a  few  days  after  I  had  received  Mr.  Wil- 
liams's letter.  He  recalled  at  once  the  names  of  the  directors, 
and  as  quickly  said: 

"  Mr.  Earling  will  get  nothing  out  of  them,  for  W. R is 

about  the  strongest  man  of  the  lot,  and  he  won't  give  a  cent." 

"I  acknowledge  a  moral  obligation."  With  that  fine  answer 
of  the  President  of  the  St.  Paul,  an  epoch-making  settlement 
was  finally  arrived  at.     The  English  workmen's  Compensation 


4i  8  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Act  of  1906  was  proposed  as  a  basis,  and  almost  half  a  million 
was  paid  in  settlement  of  claims,  one  quarter  of  which  could 
not  have  been  met  by  the  liquidation  of  the  coal  company  itself. 
This  brave,  simple-hearted  servant  of  his  fellows  lived  long 
enough  to  see  the  task  he  had  undertaken  finished,  and  was 
later  appointed  United  States  Fuel  Administrator  for  Illinois. 
I  heard  he  was  in  poor  health  and  wrote  to  him.  He  answered 
that  he  had  to  go  to  a  hospital  to  undergo  a  severe  operation, 
and  of  it  he  died,  a  few  days  later.  I  print  part  of  the  last 
letter  I  had  from  him: 

Dear  Dr.  Rainsford: 

Pardon  pencil,  but  I  am  on  a  sick  bed,  and  want  to  acknowledge  your  kind 
letter  before  I  leave  home  for  the  hospital,  where  I  go  to-morrow  to  be  oper- 
ated on. 

My  dear  Sir,  your  praise  is  very  precious  to  me  indeed — but  I  am  over-paid 
already.  It  was  a  privilege  to  have  been  permitted  to  engage  in  it.  It  was 
an  inspiration  to  come  in  contact  with  human  souls  as  I  did,  in  those  supreme 
moments  when  they  are  put  to  the  test,  and  to  find  nobility  and  grandeur 
where  common  report  would  lead  us  only  to  expect  selfishness  and  greed. 
It  seems  worth  while  to  have  lived  in  this  obscure  place  for  the  better  part  of 
a  life  time,  that  so  I  might  command  the  confidence  that  enabled  me  to  be- 
come the  instrument  for  this  work.  In  the  atmosphere  of  suspicion  and 
jealousy  that  was  aroused,  no  one  could  have  succeeded  as  a  mediator  whose 
life  was  not  open  and  free  from  taint  of  false  motive,  political  or  other. 

So  it  seems  providential  that  my  long  and  uneventful  years  were  turned 
to  such  profit,  and  that  I  was  enabled  to  capitalize  my  quiet  life  into  an  as- 
set that  nothing  can  take  from  me. 

Very  cordially  yours, 

J.  E.  Williams. 

Albert  J.  Earling,  President  of  the  Chicago,  Milwaukee  &  St. 
Paul  Railway,  writes  to  J.  E.  Williams: 

No  one  could  have  gone  to  Cherry  in  its  hour  of  disaster  without  being 
profoundly  impressed  with  the  futility  of  mere  legal  remedies.  At  such  an 
hour,  the  question  of  legal  rights  and  duties  becomes  insignificant,  as  com- 
pared with  the  impelling  call  of  humanity. 

I  am  glad  that  the  Cherry  settlement  bids  fair  to  be  an  epoch-making  event 
in  the  relations  between  employers  and  employed  in  this  country.  All  who 
had  part  in  bringing  it  about  must  have  their  share  of  credit.  But  above  and 
beyond  them  all,  no  single  factor  is  of  as  much  importance  as  your  own  un- 
daunted persistence  in  the  presence  of  circumstances  that  so  often  seemed 
hopeless. 

If,  out  of  the  wreckage  of  property  and  tombs  of  men  at  Cherry,  there  shall 


FOUR  DINNERS  419 

come  forth  a  permanent  betterment  of  the  relations  of  employer  and  em- 
ployed, it  shall  stand  as  a  monument  to  your  unfaltering  effort  to  establish 
among  men  a  lasting  principle  of  equity  and  justice. 

That  dinner  in  the  White  House  foreshadowed  the  work  of 
these  two  great  men,  a  miner  and  a  railroad  president,  so  unlike 
in  many  things,  but  so  finely  united  in  one. 

Shortly  after  my  return  from  Africa  in  1913,  where  I  had  been 
conducting  a  small  scientific  expedition  in  the  interests  of  the 
American  Museum  of  Natural  History,  I  ran  against  an  old 
friend  on  Fifth  Avenue,  Herbert  Taylor.  In  the  '8o's,  he  had 
been  often  good  enough  to  play  tennis  with  me.  Good  enough, 
I  say,  for  I  was  a  poor  player,  and  he  a  "crack."  We  had  not 
met  for  years. 

"You  must  come  and  dine  with  me  to-morrow.  I  am  giving 
a  dinner  to  celebrate  my  own  birthday,  and  a  group  of  men 
whose  lawyer  I  have  been  are  coming.     I  want  you." 

I  protested  that  I  was  a  back  number,  and  would  be  out  of  it 
in  such  company,  but  since  Herbert  Taylor  would  not  take  a 
refusal,  and  said  that  he  really  wanted  me  there,  I  accepted, 
without  having  the  least  idea  of  the  shape  my  host  had  planned 
that  this  dinner  should  take. 

Next  evening  the  company  was  on  time,  and  I  found  myself 
one  of  an  unusual  crowd.  All  there  had  done  things,  and  some 
of  the  things  some  of  them  had  recently  done  had  been  de- 
clared illegal  by  the  courts  of  the  country.  All  present  I  can- 
not remember,  but  there  were  Judge  Gary,  President  of  the 
United  States  Steel  Company;  G.  W.  Wickersham;  F.  W.  Whit- 
ridge,  President  of  the  Third  Avenue  Railroad;  Duke,  tobacco 
magnate;  Hamilton  Fish,  and  a  western  railroad  president 
whose  name  I  cannot  recall;  and  Judge  Lacomb,  then  almost 
seventy  years  old,  of  the  Circuit  Court  of  Appeals. 

Our  host  was  genial  and  tactful.  The  dinner  was  good; 
and  when  it  was  over,  everybody  was  in  a  good  humour.  Then 
came  a  surprise  to  me,  and  I  could  see  to  the  company  as  well. 
When  Herbert  Taylor  had  thanked  his  friends  for  accepting  his 
invitation  and  drinking  his  health,  he  said: 

The  hurrying  life  of  New  York  does  not  make  it  easy  to  gather  together  the 
sort  of  company  met  here  to-night.  Suppose  we  do  not  waste  our  evening. 
Here  are  men  whose  circumstances  have  compelled  them  to  look  at  life  from 


42o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

different  points  of  view.  Let  us  be  frank  with  each  other.  Let  us  say  what 
we  think  of  the  present  conditions  and  tendencies  of  to-day.  I  drink  to  the 
Judge. 

The  Judge  spoke  at  length  and  with  emphasis.  He  deplored 
the  flood  of  legislation  that  was  pouring  forth  from  state  legis- 
latures and  from  Washington.  He  thought  too  much  of  it  was 
ill-considered  and  rash,  and  would  prove  ineffective.  His  chief 
objection  to  it,  however,  was  not  on  these  general  accounts,  but 
that  it  seemed  to  him  to  be  an  effort  made  at  the  instigation  of 
the  masses  of  our  people  to  despoil  the  rich. 

In  short,  the  Judge  feared  that  to-day  ninety-five  per  cent, 
of  the  citizens  of  the  United  States  were  trying  to  see  how  far 
they  could  despoil  the  other  five  per  cent.  Judge  Gary  followed 
Judge  Lacomb. 

The  trust  magnate  spoke  impressively.  There  was  a  note  of 
deep  feeling  in  his  voice  when  he  said: 

Gentlemen,  no  man  can  have  any  idea  how  bitter  and  intolerable  a  thing  it 
is  to  a  man  trying  to  do  right,  trying  to  direct  a  vast  business  in  such  a  way 
that  it  can  be  reasonably  prosperous  and  keep  within  the  law,  to  find  himself 
in  conflict  with  the  government  of  the  land  he  loves  and  wants  to  serve.  I 
am  responsible  to  my  stockholders;  there  are  many  thousands  of  them.  I  am 
responsible  to  my  working  people;  there  are  many  thousands  of  them.  As 
president  of  the  United  States  Steel  Company,  I  have  honestly,  openly, 
sought  direction  from  the  very  highest  legal  authorities  of  the  United  States 
as  to  what  I  might  and  might  not  do. 

Here  he  turned  to  Mr.  Wickersham  and  said:  "Is  this  not  so?" 
Mr.  Wickersham  nodded  his  head. 

I  could  get  no  clear  answer;  I  could  only  go  on  my  way  publishing  fullest 
reports,  improving  machinery  and  life-saving  devices  in  the  works,  and  the 
condition  of  my  employees  outside  of  them. 

He,  too,  deplored  the  flood  of  legislation,  and  held  it  useless 
and  dangerous. 

At  this  point,  at  the  bidding  of  our  host,  we  took  a  rest. 

Mr.  Whitridge  was  noted  for  both  his  ability  and  his  mordant 
wit.  What  barred  him  from  the  widest  fields  of  social  useful- 
ness was  his  persistent  despair  of  the  institutions  of  his  country, 
and  of  the  capacity  and  honesty  of  all  men,  great  and  small, 
elected  or  appointed  to  public  office  in  it. 


FOUR  DINNERS  421 

The  going,  as  our  host  had  said,  had  been  heavy,  and  he 
would  suggest  a  lighter  vein,  and  so  turned  hrs  glass  to  that  of 
the  "gentleman  whose  letters  amused,  even  when  they  did  not 
inspire,  New  Yorkers." 

Old  New  Yorkers  will  remember  that  Mr.  Whitridge  was  a 
constant  publisher  of  letters  in  the  daily  press.  Extraordinar- 
ily clever  they  were,  each  like  a  scorpion  with  a  sting  in  its  tail. 

But  round  our  dinner  table  the  atmosphere  was  still  heavy. 
The  letter-writer  was  in  a  gray  mood.  The  commissioners, 
politicians,  ignorant  masses,  were  playing  the  devil  with  the 
country,  according  to  him.  Public  officials  were  either  stupid  or 
corrupt.  As  he  prepared  to  sit  down,  the  company  was  startled 
by  his  final  statement: 

"Nothing  can  save  us  from  national  calamity  but  a  revival 
of  religion." 

Now,  coming  from  the  quarter  it  did,  this  was  startling; 
and  had  he  remained  he  would  doubtless  have  been  induced  to 
tell  what  sort  of  religion  he  hoped  to  see  revived.  But  having 
made  this  Parthian  thrust,  the  letter-writer  fled  the  company. 
I  may  say  that  this  was  a  well-known  habit  of  his. 

Next  to  speak  was  a  representative  of  one  of  New  York's 
oldest  families,  Mr.  Fish.  He  agreed  fully  with  the  previous 
speakers. 

"The  trend  of  legislation  was  highly  dangerous.  It  looked 
only  to  the  despoiling  of  the  rich,  but  it  must  be  remembered 
that  this  was  nothing  new.  He  had  had  occasion  years  ago  to 
present  before  a  congressional  committee  his  views  of  the 
matter.  On  that  occasion  he  pointed  out  that  ever  since  the 
first  quarter  of  the  last  century  an  organized  campaign  had 
been  on  foot  by  the  'have  nots'  to  rob  the  pockets  of  the 
'haves.'  This  wholly  unrighteous  and  unpatriotic  movement 
was  gaining  ground,  and  he  saw  but  one  means  of  finally  de- 
feating it.  The  last  speaker  had  named  that  means — a  revival 
of  religion.  Nothing  else  could  save  the  country,  for  when 
men  ceased  to  believe  in  God  they  would  cease  to  respect  property ." 

At  this  frank  statement,  which  fitted  in  exactly  with  the 
letter-writer's  views,  everyone  sat  up.  Then  Herbert  Taylor 
called  on  me. 

"I  have  an  old  friend  here  to-night  who,  I  know,  will  defend 
the  ninety-five  per  cent." 


422  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE  ~ 

I  felt  rather  alone  in  the  crowd,  but  the  last  sentence  of  the 
Judge's  talk  gave  me  an  opening.  As  he  sat  down  he  had  said, 
with  some  feeling,  "We  judges,  gentlemen,  are  lonely  men." 
So  I  began  my  brief  defence  of  the  ninety-five  per  cent,  of 
my  fellow-citizens  by  accepting  his  statement  and  enlarging 
on  it. 

From  the  nature  of  the  case  the  judiciary  cannot  always  be  expected  to  be 
in  sympathy  with  the  masses  of  our  people,  or  always  sympathetic  with  their 
aims. 

The  judiciary  expounds  the  law. 

The  law  expressed  the  will  of  the  past — the  efforts  of  other  generations  to 
defend  man's  rights  as  those  generations  conceived  of  them. 

The  judges  have  neither  time  nor  opportunity  to  mingle  with  the  people. 
There  is  a  certain  necessary  aloofness  about  the  atmosphere  of  the  Bench. 

Neither  from  the  bar  nor  the  dock  can  they  get  an  unbiased  view  of  con- 
temporary life. 

When  it  comes  to  weighing  and  calculating  the  meaning  and  value  of 
popular  movements,  the  judges  are  sometimes  poorly  equipped  to  do  so. 

A  ripe  and  final  judgment  should  not  be  expected  of  them. 

Nor  can  the  very  rich  man  be  expected  to  judge  fairly.  He  is,  at  his  best, 
human,  and  subject  to  his  environment,  as  we  are  all  of  us. 

In  short,  no  one  class  in  the  community  is  really  Christian  enough  to  be 
entrusted  with  the  fortune  of  another  class.  Almost  all  men  vote  in  favour 
of  their  pockets. 

The  fate  of  the  fortune  of  the  rich  cannot  be  left  to  the  poor,  nor  can  the 
fate  of  the  poor  be  handed  over  to  the  tender  mercies  of  the  rich. 

The  man  whose  judgment  is  most  likely  to  be  fair  and  balanced  is  the  man 
whose  life  brings  him  in  intimate  acquaintance  with  both  rich  and  poor,  and 
such  men,  I  assert,  are  never  pessimists  on  these  great  questions  we  are  dis- 
cussing. 

You  cannot  persuade  them  that  ninety-five  per  cent,  of  the  people  of  our 
country  are  seeking  to  take  what  is  not  rightfully  their  own. 

Those  who  know  anything  of  history,  those  who  have  studied  other  lands 
and  peoples,  will  be  ready  to  assert  that  in  no  other  land  and  at  no  other  times 
have  the  masses  been  so  intelligent,  so  fair-minded,  as  are  ours. 

Let  us  admit  that  the  democracy  is  making  law;  admit  there  is  too  much 
of  it;  admit  it  is  often  unwise  and  hasty — that  does  no  more  than  prove  that  a 
fair-minded  majority  want  a  square  deal,  and  are  taking  the  only  way  they 
know  to  get  it. 

I  heartily  agree  that  we  need  a  religious  revival,  but  a  religious  revival  is 
not  coming;  it  has  come,  and  the  big  men  won't  see  it. 

It  is  not,  it  can  never  be,  a  revival  of  the  sort  of  religion  that  they  look 
for  and  hope  in,  namely,  a  revival  of  the  religion  of  a  God  of  property.  That 
God  is  dead  as  a  Juggernaut. 

But  a  revival  of  a  real  religion  is  on  us;  is  vitalizing  our  land,  is  changing 


FOUR  DINNERS  423 

our  habits;  is  revolutionizing  our  ideals  of  justice  and  right.     It  is  leavening 
our  people  as  never  before.    It  is  the  religion  of  the  God  of  men. 

Property  is  all  right.  Property  is  so  necessary  that  we  are  not  likely 
to  make  too  little  of  it,  but  before,  far  before  the  rights  of  property,  come  the 
rights  of  men,  and  women,  and  little  children. 

Then  spoke  the  man  whom  all  wanted  to  hear,  the  chief  guest 
of  the  evening.     Said  the  Cabinet  Minister: 

No,  the  ninety-five  per  cent,  are  not  trying  to  despoil  the  rich;  they  are 
only  trying,  by  mistaken  methods  it  may  be,  to  get  a  fair  deal. 

You  blame  them  for  this  flood  of  ill-digested  legislation.  How  could 
any  one  with  his  eyes  open  expect  them  to  take  any  other  course?  For 
twenty  years  what  have  they  seen?  They  have  seen  the  vastest  fortunes  the 
world  knows  of  poured  into  the  pockets  of  the  few.  How?  By  legislation. 
I  speak  what  I  know,  and  no  man  in  the  land  is  in  a  better  position  to  know 
than  I.  Those  fortunes,  swollen  and  unrighteous,  could  not  have  been  made 
except  by  unfair  legislation.  Legislation  sometimes  obtained  by  dishonesty 
and  even  crime. 

These  are  the  facts,  gentlemen.  They  are  facts  of  record.  They  cannot 
be  denied.  Who  then  shall  blame  the  masses  of  the  land  if  by  legislation 
they  seek  to  undo  some  part  of  the  wrong  that  by  legislation  has  been  done 
them? 

Mr.  Wickersham  spoke  with  absolute  frankness  of  the  great 
fortune  that  was  not  represented  at  the  table,  the  Rockefeller 
fortune,  and  a  great  fortune  that  was  Mr.  Duke's,  and  ended: 
"Neither  of  them  can  be  defended  in  morals  or  in  law."  (I 
cjuote  his  exact  words.  I  wrote  them  on  my  shirt  cuff  at  the 
time !) 

There  was  no  answer  made  to  Mr.  Wickersham's  masterly 
statement  of  a  plain  case. 

After  some  further  talk,  the  last  speaker,  the  railroad  presi- 
dent, rose  to  his  feet.  Very  slowly  he  spoke,  but  no  one  had 
addressed  us  more  impressively  than  he  now  proceeded  to  do: 

I  fully  agree  with  the  late  Attorney  General.  For  many  years  it  was  my 
special  business  to  make  railroad  rebates,  as  some  here  know.  I  had  to  visit 
many  parts  of  the  land.  I  did  as  others  did.  I  did  what  at  the  time  all 
approved.  Every  man  tried  for  rebates  and  vast  numbers  got  them. 
Rebates  were  defended  as  but  the  exercise  of  a  constitutional  right  to  use 
your  own  money  as  you  pleased.  Mr.  Wickersham  spoke  of  vast  fortunes 
mainly  gotten  by  such  means.  I  will  add  to  what  he  said,  and  I  will  say  that 
there  is  not  a  city  of  100,000  people  in  the  United  States  where  I  could  not 
put  my  finger  on  an  ample  fortune  made  by  rebating.  Gentlemen,  it  was  all 
wrong.    It  was  demoralizing  and  unfair.    It  was  playing  with  marked  cards, 


424  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

but  it  is  over.     No  man  in  the  United  States  can  get  a  rebate  to-day,  and 
every  honest  man  is  glad  of  it. 

But  mark  you,  this  great,  far-reaching,  and  highly  just  reform  was  won  in 
one  way,  and  one  way  only.  It  was  won  for  the  people,  and  by  the  people, 
by  legislation. 

No  one  present  at  that  dinner  will,  I  think,  forget  it.  I  do 
not  think  such  talk  would  have  been  endured,  I  do  not  think 
that  dinner  party  would  have  held  together,  ten  years  earlier. 
And  more,  I  think  that  to  Theodore  Roosevelt's  influence  and 
example,  more  than  to  any  other  cause,  or  all  causes  put  to- 
gether, was  due  the  spread  of  so  fine  and  frank  a  spirit  of  fair 
dealing  as  was  then  displayed.  I  should  add  that  the  fine  old 
Judge,  as  we  bade  each  other  good-night,  said:  "This  dinner 
has  done  me  good,  gentlemen.  I  have  had  a  new  light  to- 
night." 

A  great  honour  was  done  me  when  I  was  asked  to  be  present 
at  the  fourth  dinner  of  which  I  now  speak.  In  May,  1919, 
some  time  after  its  demobilization,  a  company  of  the  307th 
Regiment  of  the  77th  Division,  New  York,  met  for  a  farewell 
dinner.  It  was  not  a  charitable  affair.  After  a  long  service 
overseas,  the  company's  fund  had  something  left  over,  and  so 
voted  itself  a  farewell  dinner  in  a  large  New  York  hotel. 

Officers  and  men  came  on  time  to  the  rendezvous,  and  at  the 
appointed  hour  we  sat  down. 

Some  were  in  uniform,  some  in  mufti.  There  were  only  two 
other  civilians  present  beside  myself.  One  of  these  had  lost 
his  son,  a  lieutenant  in  the  company,  who  was  killed  in  action; 
the  other  had  devoted  his  energies  during  the  war  to  keeping  to- 
gether the  wives,  parents,  and  friends  ofthe  boys  who  had  gone 
overseas.  My  son  had  captained  the  company  during  the  first 
days  of  its  fiercest  fighting  in  the  Argonne,  and  had  turned 
over  his  command  when  severely  wounded.  I  was  an  outsider, 
of  course,  yet  long  residence  in  New  York  and  an  intimate 
knowledge  of  its  East  Side  had  given  me  more  than  a  fair  knowl- 
edge of  the  material  of  which  this  band  of  men  was  composed. 

Men  demobilized  in  New  York  scatter  quickly,  and  it  said 
much  for  the  strength  of  the  new  tie,  which  a  common  cause  and 
a  common  danger  had  created,  that  over  one  hundred  men  of 
that  company,  and  all  of  its  officers  remaining  alive,  gathered 
round  the  table  for  their  farewell  to  one  another  that  night. 


FOUR  DINNERS  425 

As  I  looked  down  the  long  table  something  of  the  wonder  of 
that  gathering,  something  of  its  immense  significance,  came  to 
me.  As  the  evening  passed  (we  met  at  seven-thirty  and  did  not 
separate  until  after  midnight)  this  feeling  deepened.  Less 
than  two  years  before  I  had  seen  these  very  men  taken  almost 
without  notice  or  warning  out  of  the  great  city's  life  of  which 
they  were  a  part. 

Raw  and  most  unwarlike  were  they  then,  many  of  them  un- 
derstanding little  of  the  great  world  movement  that  was  laying 
such  violent  hands  on  their  bodies  and  their  souls.  Some  of 
them  not  wanting  to  understand  it,  going  to  Camp  Upton  only 
because  they  had  to  go.  Some  were  American  in  name  only, 
some  were  not  even  American  in  name,  and  many  of  them  could 
not  speak  English. 

The  company  officers,  on  whose  young  shoulders  had  de- 
scended the  extraordinarily  difficult  task  of  making  soldiers  of 
them,  were  most  of  them  Plattsburg  men.  They  brought  little 
military  experience  to  their  task,  it  is  true,  but  in  my  judgment 
they  had  brought  something  more  than  that.  Generally  speak- 
ing they  were  men  of  some  culture.  Good  schools  and  universi- 
ties had  given  them  some  knowledge  of  men,  and  very  many 
of  them  had  already  won  a  moderate  success  in  the  profession 
of  life. 

Our  hastily  raised  army  had  of  necessity  to  be  a  democratic 
army.  The  iron  discipline  of  an  army  of  many  years'  training 
could  not  be  given  it.  It  was  lacking  in  many  things  that  the 
professional  soldiers  consider  indispensable.  But  three  things 
it  had  to  have,  if  it  was  to  win  at  all:  a  fighting  spirit,  confidence 
in  itself,  and  belief  in  its  good  cause. 

I  spent  some  unforgettable  days,  shortly  after  we  declared  war, 
with  Colonel  Wolff,  Commandant  at  Plattsburg.  Here  I  saw, 
and  had  the  high  honour  of  speaking  to,  the  two  most  wonder- 
ful bodies  of  young  men  any  man  ever  faced  in  this  country.  I 
felt  their  spirit,  I  realized  their  mighty  power.  I  knew  then 
that  America  could  draw  from  her  sons,  officers  capable  of 
training  and  inspiring  in  peace,  and  leading  in  war,  her  demo- 
cratic millions  of  drafted  men. 

This  was  Colonel  Wolff's  conviction,  and  he  was  right.  But 
let  me  get  back  to  our  dinner. 

It  was  the  last  gathering  of  a  company  of  men  who  had 


426  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

trained,  toiled,  suffered,  conquered,  and  died  together.  Army 
discipline  for  them  was  now  over,  many  were  already  back  in 
civilian  life.  Few  were  in  uniform,  and  every  man  there  might 
say  his  say  this  night.  And  say  it  they  did,  not  officers  only, 
but  non-coms  and  buck  privates.  We  had  a  right  good  din- 
ner, with  plenty  of  tobacco  and  light  beer.  The  bars  were 
down,  and  it  was  time  for  joke  and  story  and  song. 

As  the  evening  grew  later  my  amazement  grew.  Many  a 
dinner  had  I  attended  in  my  varied  life  and  in  a  good  many 
lands — college  dinners,  racing  dinners,  club  dinners,  dinners  of 
all  sorts.  If  at  such  gatherings  here  and  there  a  man  drank  too 
much  and  showed  it,  or  told  a  questionable  story;  if  now  and 
then  there  was  noisy  talk — no  one  resented  it,  no  one  was  sur- 
prised. But  here  at  this  company  dinner  of  disbanded  soldiers 
there  was  nothing  of  the  sort.  I  speak  the  simple  truth,  amaz- 
ing as  it  is.  Not  one  vulgar  story  (and  scores  of  most  excellent 
stories  were  told).  Not  one  unkind  story,  though  there  were 
plentiful  jokes  on  men  by  officers  and  on  officers  by  men. 

I  had  thought  that  such  things  might  be,  but  as  I  sat  there 
and  tried  to  realize  what  was  passing  before  me,  I  found  it  hard 
to  keep  the  tears  from  my  eyes.  I  was  seeing  the  actuality  of 
human  brotherhood,  born  and  grown  to  power  and  high  effi- 
ciency, finding  its  fine  selfhood  in  unselfish  service  for  men. 

The  hour  was  growing  late.  Officers  had  praised  men,  and 
men  had  chaffed  and  praised  their  officers  and  one  another. 
There  had  been  wit  aplenty,  and  fine,  unconscious  pathos,  too, 
for  the  brave  fellows  left  under  the  sod  in  France  had  not  been 
forgotten. 

Some  had  to  go  far  that  night.  The  company  had  to  do  what 
it  had  never  done  in  France:  break  up. 

A  big  fellow  who  had  not  spoken  during  the  evening  raised 
himself  up  at  the  foot  of  the  table.  He  leaned  on  his  crutches, 
for  he  had  lost  a  leg  near  the  hip,  and  one  side  of  his  face  was 
still  covered  with  plaster.     Said  he: 

I've  got  to  get  back  to  the  hospital,  but  before  I  go  I  want  to  say  some- 
thing. When  I  was  drafted  and  went  to  Upton  I  could  not  say  one  word  of 
English,  and  I  was  only  twenty-five  per  cent.  American.  I  have  lost  a  leg 
and  part  of  my  face,  and  my  people  say  I  have  lost  a  lot,  but  I  do  not  say  so. 
I  have  gained  a  lot.  I  am  glad  I  went  to  the  war.  I  am  one  hundred  per  cent. 
American  now. 


FOUR  DINNERS  427 

And  so  came  to  an  end  a  wonderful  evening.  The  boys 
themselves  could  not  realize  how  wonderful  it  was;  but  to  me  it 
seemed  the  greatest  dinner  I  have  ever  attended  in  my  life. 

As  I  lay  awake  that  night,  old  scenes  rose  before  me,  and  the 
faces  of  men  I  loved  who  were  dead.  I  thought  of  the  sullen, 
angry  men  and  despairing  women  I  had  seen  seated  in  the 
Pittsburgh  mud,  thirty  years  before,  no  kinder,  juster  influence 
near  them  than  the  soulless  grip  of  a  corporation.  I  thought  of 
my  friend,  the  greatest  preacher  of  our  time,  who,  without  fear 
or  favour,  whether  men  cursed  him  or  flattered  him,  had,  in 
season  and  out  of  season,  preached  the  "square  deal"  for  all 
men,  home-born  or  foreign-born,  black  or  white,  wherever  the 
flag  flew. 

And  I  thought  of  how  "the  heat  of  that  spirit  had  shed 
warmth  through  many  lands."  I  thought  of  Williams's  appeal 
to  President  Earling,  and  of  President  Earling's  appeal  to  his 
millionaire  directors,  as  he  said:  "I  acknowledge  a  moral  obliga- 
tion." And  of  the  answer  made  at  Cherry  Mine  by  the  five  per 
cent,  to  the  plea  of  the  ninety-five  per  cent.  Such  an  answer 
had  never  before  been  made  in  our  land. 

And — oh,  how  I  wished  that  every  preacher  in  every  church 
in  New  York  and  out  of  it  could  have  seen  what  I  had  seen  and 
heard  what  I  had  heard  that  night!  And  for  one  of  the 
bravest  and  truest  prophets  of  God  I  ever  knew,  I  longed — I 
wanted  Jacob  Riis  at  that  dinner.  I  wanted  him  to  know  how 
"Tony,"  whom  he  loved  and  believed  in,  had  made  good. 

There  are  new  tasks  awaiting  us,  and  new  and  great  prob- 
lems to  solve.  But  God  has  given  to  us  a  new  power  and  a  new 
unity  with  which  to  meet  and  conquer  them.  Of  this  I  felt  sure 
as  I  fell  asleep. 


CHAPTER  XXIX 

Holidays  and  "Sunlight" 

For  oh,  he  stood  beside  me  like  my  youth, 
Transformed  for  me  the  real  to  the  dream, 

Clothing  the  palpable  and  the  familiar 
With  golden  exhalation  of  the  dawn. — Schiller. 

"Wallenstein." 

The  night  gives  back  that  double  day 
Which  clothed  the  earth  when  I  was  young. — T.  Burbridge. 

The  best  way  to  do  your  work  well  is  to  keep  young  while 
you  do  it.  The  spirit  of  youth  is  the  best  antidote  to  the  spirit 
of  materialism.  Youth  means  faith  in  yourself,  joy  in  your 
work,  trust  in  your  fellows,  and  enthusiasm  for  the  old  world 
you  live  in.     So,  say  I,  keep  young. 

Wallenstein  was  one  of  the  grimmest  figures  in  perhaps  the 
grimmest  period  of  European  history.  The  Sixteenth  Century 
abounded  in  hope;  the  Seventeenth  yielded  to  despair;  but 
Schiller,  in  his  fine  tragedy,  makes  his  hero  declare  that  it  is  the 
visiting  spirit  of  his  lost  youth  alone  that  enables  him  to  brave 
fate. 

When  first  I  read  the  play  long  ago  these  lines  I  have  put  at 
the  head  of  the  chapter  fascinated  me.  I  say,  then,  it  pays  to 
keep  young;  pays  yourself,  your  family,  your  friends,  your 
work.  And  the  best  way  to  keep  young  is  to  take  every  holi- 
day you  reasonably  and  unselfishly  can;  and  even  if  and  when 
the  tough  door  of  opportunity  closes  on  you,  and  your  holidays 
are  but  a  memory,  then  still  I  say  in  the  memory  of  them 
you  can  regain  enough  of  their  hope  and  joy  and  courage  to 
enable  you  to  live  them  over  again. 

Such  being  my  conviction,  I  want  it  understood  that  in 
this  chapter  I  am  on  holiday-making  bent,  and  nothing  shall 
induce  me  to  hurry.     Holidays  are  leisurely  times  or  they  are 

428 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  429 

no  holidays  at  all.  I  shall  travel  at  will  the  world  over,  visit 
places  now  changed  beyond  recognition,  and  once  more  keep 
happy  company  with  fine  fellows  who,  almost  all  of  them,  hunt 
and  fish  and  trap  and  march  no  longer  among  the  mountains 
and  woodlands  we  explored  together. 

I  never  could  see  any  incongruity  between  sporting  and 
preaching;  on  the  contrary,  I  am  sure  I  never  preached  so  well 
as  when  I  returned  from  a  rest  in  the  wild.  By  the  way,  I  will 
quote  a  story  worth  repeating,  a  story  of  old  Castle  Saunderson 
days,  just  to  prove  that  in  my  sporting  activities,  at  least,  I  had 
what  I  fear  sometimes  in  other  matters  was  lacking:  Episcopal 
precedent  for  what  I  loved  to  do. 

The  Bishop  of  Peterboro,  Doctor  McGee  was,  in  his  day,  the 
ablest  preacher  in  England,  and  as  a  debater  he  had  few  equals 
in  the  House  of  Lords.  Before  he  became  Bishop  he  was  Dean 
of  Enniskillen  in  Ireland,  and  was  well  known  in  County 
Fermannah.  The  Earl  of  Erne  was  his  friend,  and  when  at 
Crom  Castle  they  had  a  big  "shoot,"  McGee  was  among  the 
invited.  The  Earl's  head  keeper  was  a  dour  North  of  Ireland 
Presbyterian  and  had  the  placing  of  the  guns.  As  in  duty 
bound,  he  gave  the  Bishop  a  good  stand,  but  could  not  resist 
the  temptation  of  firing  a  parting  shot  at  the  worldly  successor 
of  the  Apostles  as  he  left  him  at  his  place. 

Keeper:  "I  never  heard,  my  Lord,  that  the  Apostles  went 
pheasant  shooting." 

Bishop:  "No,  John,  they  did  not  preserve  game  in  Pales- 
tine, so  they  had  to  content  themselves  with 
fishing." 

Yes,  take  holidays  while  you  may,  and  do  what  in  you  lies  to 
pass  the  holiday  spirit  on.  My  debt  to  my  father  and  mother 
in  this  matter  I  have  tried  to  repay  by  giving  my  sons  what 
they  gave  me. 

The  delicious  smell  of  bacon  frying  in  the  early  morning,  even 
when  it  rises  to  me  from  a  civilized,  prosaic  kitchen,  brings 
crowding  memories  of  blessed  out-of-doors.  It  is  far  more 
than  a  mere  call  to  the  satisfaction  of  healthy  appetite;  it 
brings  memories  of  golden  days  that  cannot  be  forgotten. 
Again  I  am  suddenly  awakened  by  the  shouting  of  my  com- 
panions to  meet  another  day  in  the  wild.     Silvery  steam  is 


430  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

rising  from  the  lake,  and  through  it  bursts  the  level  beams  of 
the  rising  sun,  bathing  the  world  in  morning  glory. 

"  Look  how  the  floor  of  heaven 
Is  thick  inlaid  with  patines  of  bright  gold," 

cries  Lorenzo  to  Jessica,  as  Shakespeare's  lovers  greet  the 
morning. 

Blankets  are  cast  off,  and  into  the  clear  cold  water  all  hands 
rush  with  shivering  joy.  A  plunge,  a  few  rapid  strokes  out  and 
in,  and  then  the  second  call  of  the  waiting  frying  pan,  and  the 
joys  of  camp  breakfast. 

What  variety  of  beauty,  what  warming  memories  of  adven- 
ture, what  clean,  honest  friendships,  the  sizzling  of  that  odorous 
pan  recalls !  What  golden  days  of  early  youth,  when  weariness 
of  the  flesh  was  sheer  pleasure,  when  feeling  was  supremest 
and  reflection  scarcely  begun!  And  even  fuller  days  in  later 
years,  days  of  well-earned  rest  and  change,  days  of  refreshment 
and  renewal,  "far  from  the  madding  crowd!"  Frying  bacon  to 
call  up  so  much  bygone  life  and  beauty!  Tush,  you  say. 
There  is  no  shallow  sentimentality  about  it,  I  assure  you,  dear 
friend  reader.  The  actual  fact  is  that  the  smell  of  bacon  frying 
for  my  breakfast  has  often  helped  me  to  begin  a  difficult  day's 
work  with  grateful  memories  of  what  it  has  been  given  me  to 
see  and  feel  and  know  in  a  world  at  least  as  full  of  joy  and 
beauty  as  it  is  of  sorrow  and  of  death. 

I  have  told  in  earlier  chapters  how  the  love  of  the  open 
world,  especially  in  the  very  early  morning,  came  to  be  an 
important  part  of  a  little  boy's  education  in  the  old  vicarage 
at  Dundalk.  My  mother  in  her  garden  inviting  my  aid,  and 
my  father  denying  himself  in  order  to  give  me  a  pony  and  a  gun. 
A  high  brick  wall,  heavily  draped  with  ivy,  shut  out  the  vicarage 
from  the  rambling  street  of  one-story  straw-thatched  cabins 
in  which  it  stood.  A  narrow  door  in  that  wall  gave  entrance 
to  its  modest  grounds  and  gardens.  Right  opposite  that  door 
stood  the  cabin  of  William  Ogle,  my  first  "extra  family" 
instructor  in  the  mysteries  of  the  wild.  Most  little  Irish  towns 
in  those  days  had  their  local  fisherman  and  shot;  sometimes  I 
fear,  inclined  to  poaching.  From  such  men  much  was  to  be 
learned,  and  William  Ogle  was  the  first  to  take  a  kindly  notice 
of  me  and  teach  me  the  a-b-c  of  out-of-doors. 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  431 

The  chase  and  study  of  wild  things  always  fascinated  me. 
Some  philosophic  pacifists  will  have  it  that  this  is  but  the 
undesirable  unworthy  survival  of  a  savage  instinct  in  us,  an 
instinct  destined  to  shrivel  to  a  vestiguum  like  our  vermiform 
appendix.  It  may  be  the  remnant  of  the  beast  part;  I  suppose 
it  is.  But  I  do  know  that  its  immense  usefulness  has  not 
passed  away.  It  may  be  the  surviving  form  of  what  was  once 
a  savage  instinct.  If  it  is,  I  hold  that  still  it  plays  a  healthful 
and  most  desirable  part,  and  leads  to  the  formation  of  habits 
that  are  essential  to  happy  homes,  healthy  children  and 
plenty  of  them. 

But  again  I  must  insist  on  the  difference  between  the  real 
hunter,  fisherman,  and  woodsman,  and  the  mere  killer  of  game. 
The  first  must  be  a  man  of  self-reliance  and  quick  decision.  He 
must  be  a  trained  observer.  I  have  known  him  in  many  lands 
and  of  many  tints  of  colour;  and  I  say  he  has  not  only  these 
qualities,  but  is  apt  to  be  the  best  of  his  breed,  and  a  resourceful, 
brave,  unselfish,  and  faithful  companion.  The  killer  of  game  I 
have  known,  too,  or  the  man  who  hires  another  to  do  his  hunt- 
ing, and  contents  himself  with  killing.  Such  a  man  (and  over- 
sudden  wealth  has  made  him  common)  is  not  a  sportsman,  but 
a  destroyer.  His  house  may  be  full  of  hunting  trophies,  which 
he  may  or  may  not  have  shot;  but  of  wild  life,  of  the  habits  of 
wild  things,  of  things  that  should  be  preserved,  and  things  that 
may  without  loss  be  captured,  he  knows  nothing.  He  may 
have  travelled  in  many  lands,  and  lived  among  many  tribes  of 
men,  but  if  he  has  done  so,  they  did  not  interest  him,  and  he 
has  gained  little  from  them.  The  wonder,  the  mystery,  the 
beauty  of  the  wilderness  that  has  not  as  yet  bowed  her  neck  to 
man,  her  lord — these  mean  nothing  to  him.  Whether  shooting 
into  the  herds  of  big  game  in  Africa,  or  bragging  of  his  bag  of 
ducks  or  quail  in  the  Carolinas  or  Mississippi,  he  remains  a 
mere  destroyer,  not  a  sportsman.  He  is  surrounded  by  and 
dependent  on  men  hired  to  make  his  sport.  He  sits  in  his 
canoe  reading  a  novel,  till  his  Indian,  who  has  extra  pay  be- 
cause he  casts  the  best  line  on  the  river,  hooks  his  salmon. 
Then  your  millionaire,  who  has  taken  up  sport  in  a  patronizing 
way,  lays  down  his  book  and  plays  his  fish,  and  enters  it  in  the 
club  record  book  as  duly  killed  by  him.  A  stranger  trains 
and  keeps  his  dogs.     He  does  not  know  anything  or  care 


432  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

anything  about  dogs,  and  naturally  the  instructive  intimacy 
between  master  and  dog,  one  of  the  pleasantest  experiences 
that  outdoor  life  yields,  is  to  him  a  thing  undreamed. 

But  I  am  holiday-making,  and  so  must  not  give  way  to 
scolding  temper — not  though  memories  will  rankle  of  good 
fellowship  broken,  and  one's  own  discoveries  of  hunting  and 
fishing  region  barred  by  the  intrusion  of  the  very  modern 
would-be  sporting  autocratic  millionaire.  Him  I  will  leave  to 
his  novel  and  his  hired  fisherman,  and  go  back  to  William  Ogle, 
who  used  to  make  his  own  rods  out  of  lancewood  he  bought 
and  a  stout  ash  he  himself  cut  and  seasoned;  wonders  of  skill 
they  seemed  to  me,  as  they  lay  on  the  cabin  rafters,  and  no 
expensive  split-cane  salmon-rod  ever  laid  out  on  the  river  a 
better  line  than  did  they  when  William  Ogle  handled  them. 

When  my  father  gave  me  my  first  $2.50  trout  rod,  I  took  it 
to  Ogle  for  approval.  He  said  it  would  do,  and  one  warm 
spring  afternoon,  a  Saturday  half-holiday,  I  remember  it  well, 
he  did  a  rarely  unselfish  thing.  He  took  me  three  miles  up  the 
little  river,  and  then  revealed  to  me  the  secret  place  where  he 
had  caught  many  a  sea  trout.  Sea  trout  were  not  common 
thereabouts.  They  were  worth  even  in  Ireland  ten  pence  a 
pound.  (Labourers'  daily  wages  were  but  a  shilling  then.) 
And  Ogle  was  a  poor  man.  On  Saturdays  I  haunted  that  spot, 
but  for  weeks  and  weeks  no  silvery  sea  trout  looked  at  my  line. 

"Who  is  the  best  fisherman?"  said  someone  at  the  Resti- 
gouche  Club.  "The  man  who  keeps  his  fly  longest  in  the 
water,"  answered  poor  Stan  White.  I  kept  mine  in  that  little 
pool  in  the  Irish  river,  and  at  last  the  lightning  struck;  my 
reel  screamed,  my  rod  bent,  and  my  heart  stopped  beating. 
I  was  ahold  of  a  fish — and  such  a  fish!  Could  any  tackle 
woven  by  the  skill  of  man  curb  and  capture  such  a  monster? 
How  I  played  and  did  not  lose  him,  I  don't  know.  I  had  no 
landing  net,  and  the  bank  was  slippery,  but  in  a  very  agony  of 
apprehension  and  delight  intermingled,  I  played  that  fish  till 
he  was  stone  dead,  and  then,  drawing  him  to  the  bank,  I  slipped 
my  finger  into  his  open  gill  and  he  was  my  very  own. 

I  started  away  at  a  run  for  home,  and  had  covered  a  good 
third  of  the  three-mile  distance  before  I  realized  that  I  had  left 
my  rod  lying  on  the  bank  on  the  scene  of  my  victory.  So  back 
I  went,  and  at  last  home  I  got.     Just  under  three  pounds  my 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  433 

"wonder"  weighed,  and  my  dear  Daddy,  almost  as  glad  and 
proud  as  I  was,  promptly  gave  me  half  a  crown. 

When  I  was  forty-four  I  had  a  message  from  Harvard  that 
"the  class"  had  elected  me  Baccalaureate  preacher.  It  was 
an  immense  surprise.  When  I  saw  my  first  great  lion  dead  at  my 
feet  I  felt  proud  and  happy.  I  had  worked  for  him  night  and 
morning  for  more  than  a  year,  and  had  never  fired  a  shot  at  a 
lion  before.  On  my  first  African  expedition  I  had  not  killed 
a  lion,  and  my  sons  said,  as  I  started  on  my  second,  "Get  a 
lion  before  you  come  home,  Daddy."  When  I  saw  my  first 
great  bull  elephant  totter  and  fall  with  a  thud  of  eleven  tons, 
weight  I  felt  profound  relief  as  well  as  surprise.  But  for  keen, 
stinging  triumph,  no  hunting  experience  in  all  my  life  quite 
came  up  to  the  taking  of  my  first  sea  trout  in  Ogle's  pool,  when 
I  was  eleven  years  old. 

Kindly,  unselfish  old  William  Ogle,  you  did  more  for  that 
boy  than  you  knew  when  you  trusted  him  with  the  secret  of  the 
best  pool  in  the  little  river.  You  confirmed  him  in  his  longing 
to  be  a  sportsman;  but  more  than  that,  a  sportsman  unselfish  in 
his  sport  like  you.  You  were  not  a  regular  attendant  at  church, 
but  you  were  a  right  good  man. 

The  real  man  comes  forth  at  the  call  of  the  wild.  I  cannot 
explain  it,  but  surely  it  is  so.  Checks  and  disguises  are  cast 
aside.  If  you  would  test  your  friend,  take  him  on  a  good  long 
camping  trip.  If  you  want  to  retain  his  friendship,  be  sure  of 
yourself  before  you  set  forth.  By  the  way,  a  happy  thought 
comes  to  me.  Now  that  girls  wear  knickerbockers  and  play 
football  and  smoke,  why  should  not  young  engaged  couples 
take  a  good  long  camping  trip  together  before  the  irrevocable 
( ?)  knot  is  tied  ?    It  might  check  divorce. 

When  the  imperative  call  of  East  London  first  sounded  for 
me  I  was  only  a  backward  country  boy,  very  emotional,  having 
as  yet  few  if  any  settled  purposes  of  my  own.  In  a  boyish  way 
I  was  fully  purposed  to  do  right,  and  so,  pushing  away  from  me 
the  things  I  loved,  I  quickly  resolved  that  for  me  bricks  and 
mortar  must  shut  out  the  open  country.  As  Father  said,  I 
always  jumped  before  I  looked.  This  being  so,  such  balance  of 
purpose  as  I  succeeded  in  gaining  came  to  me  slowly. 

Very  gradually  did  I  learn  to  win  to  conclusions  of  my  own. 
Very  gradually  did  I  dare  to  differ  in  any  particular  from  the 


434  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

autocratic  teachers  among  whom  I  had  been  brought  up.  I 
was  like  a  young  horse,  tugging  as  best  it  knew  how  at  its  load 
in  a  harness  that  did  not  fit.  I  was  willing  to  work.  I  was 
more;  I  was  in  love  with  my  work,  but  the  pinching  harness 
galled  cruelly  now  and  then.  And  as  I  looked  round  at  other 
horses,  far  longer  in  the  traces  than  I  had  been,  it  grew  in- 
creasingly evident  to  me  that  they,  too,  had  been  galled,  working 
even  as  I  was  at  the  self-same  load.  And  galled  so  badly  that 
whole  parts  of  them  had  "calloused,"  as  it  were — grown  in- 
sensible to  feeling — and  had  lost  vigour,  lost  something  of 
freshness  and  of  life.  They  were  grinding  along.  They 
marched  bravely,  with  a  fine  purposefulness,  but  there  was  little 
of  joy  of  life  in  their  tread,  and  they  seldom  sang  as  they 
marched.  In  short,  I  began  to  see  that  if  I  was  to  continue  to 
love  my  work  I  must  never  be  its  slave,  and  that  was  just  what 
it  seemed  to  me  nine  clergymen  out  of  ten,  if  they  were  really 
good  men,  finally  sank  into  being. 

From  1869  to  1880  I  never  touched  a  gun  but  once,  and  I 
had  in  all  that  time  only  one  brief,  soul-saving  outing  with 
my  rod — (I  have  told  of  it) — when  my  first  fight  in  New  York 
(1876)  was  won.  So,  friend  reader,  you  will  understand  why, 
between  William  Ogle  and  my  first  big  trout,  and  David  Ken- 
nedy, my  next  companion  amid  the  domains  of  the  Red  Gods, 
there  intervenes  so  wide  a  gap.  A  better  specimen  of  the 
Canadian  frontiersman  than  David  Kennedy  it  would  be  im- 
possible to  find.  A  grizzled  veteran  of  the  woods,  about  five 
feet  ten,  splendidly  built;  still  a  young  man  in  all  but  years,  and 
one  of  the  best  smooth-bore  shots  I  ever  saw.  I  had  been 
three  years  in  Toronto  before  we  met. 

He  lived  west  of  Toronto,  on  the  Humber  River,  and  on  one 
of  those  rare  Saturdays  when  I  was  able  to  get  off  for  a  long 
walk,  I  stumbled  on  him  directing  his  men  and  working  himself 
at  his  last  "folly,"  a  great  trout  pond.  (Gossip  said  D.  K.  was 
always  working  on  some  "folly,"  and  that  he  and  his  wife  and 
children  would  all  end  in  the  workhouse.  I  was  destined  to 
lead  him  still  further,  I  fear,  along  the  road  he  already  so 
stoutly  trod.  So  I  may,  in  justice  to  both  of  us,  say  that,  wild 
as  some  of  his  schemes  were,  there  was  a  method  in  D.  K's  mad- 
ness, and  I  believe  when  he  died  he  left  his  people  quite  well 
off.) 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  435 

There  never  was  a  man  more  obstinate  than  D.  K.  He 
must  have  been  a  trying  husband  to  live  with,  but  as  a  com- 
panion in  the  wild,  or  a  comrade  in  a  tight  place,  he  was  in- 
comparable. David  was  a  heathen,  so  people  said.  He  was 
supposed  never  to  have  entered  a  church  door  since  his  wedding 
day.  Naturally  I  was  immensely  pleased,  therefore,  when  on 
our  first  expedition  together  after  quail  I  saw  in  front  of  me,  in 
the  village  church  where  I  preached  on  Sunday,  his  grizzled 
head.  If  there  was  any  pride  at  having  won  his  attention,  it 
soon  had  a  fall — a  sudden  and  dismal  fall.  Here  is  the  story. 
D.  K.  knew  well  the  country  we  were  shooting  in,  and  usually 
all  the  farmers  gave  him  leave  to  hunt.  One  large  land  owner, 
however,  told  him  to  keep  off.  This  man  was  a  prominent 
Baptist.  I  was  by  this  time  pretty  well  known  in  western 
Canada,  and  when  the  news  got  out  that  I  was  in  the  neighbour- 
hood, there  was  quite  a  competition  among  the  village  churches 
to  have  me  preach.  Naturally  all  hands  approached  me 
through  D.  K.,  whom  they  already  knew,  and  shrewdly  he  saw 
that  he  held  winning  cards.  Never  said  he  a  word  to  me,  but  off 
he  goes  to  the  afore-mentioned  Baptist  and  strikes  a  bargain.  I 
would  honour  his  pulpit  Sunday  morning  if  on  Monday  his 
woods  and  cornfields  were  open  to  us  two.  Heaven  only  knows 
how  far  D.  K.  made  me  responsible  for  this  bargain.  I  never 
got  any  satisfaction  out  of  him  in  regard  to  that.  I  tried  in 
self-defence  to  get  the  facts  out  of  the  Baptist  brother  with  no 
better  success.  D.  K.  was  laughing  and  slapping  him  on  the 
back,  and  I  doubt  if  he  believed  one  word  I  said  as  I  protested 
that  I  was  in  no  way  responsible  for  my  "heathen's"  intrusion 
into  church  matters.  Anyway,  the  Baptist  had  my  morning 
administrations  while  I  should  have  been  preaching  to  the  Epis- 
copalians, and  we  first-class  shooting  on  Monday. 

By  the  way,  D's  success  with  the  Baptist  came  near  ruining 
my  holiday.  Not  content  with  turning  my  Sundays  to  ac- 
count, he  wanted  me  to  take  up  preaching  of  a  week  night,  and 
without  a  word  to  me,  booked  me  for  a  ten-mile  drive  in  the 
winter  dark  (after  a  day's  tramp),  to  a  Methodist  church,  this 
time.  Some  similar  scheme  up  his  sleeve  he  no  doubt  had,  but 
I  wanted  some  rest,  and  struck. 

David  Kennedy,  from  boyhood,  had  had  one  great  desire.  I 
could  sympathize  with  him,  for  I  had  shared  it.     He  longed 


436  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

to  know  the  wide  prairies  and  the  mountain  chains  beyond 
them  before  he  died.  Great  good  fortune  enabled  me  to 
gratify  this  one  wish  of  my  old  friend's  heart.  Mr.  Morgan 
would  have  me  to  take  his  son  into  the  mountains  for  a  hunting 
trip,  and  the  idea  came  to  me  that  my  friend's  presence  with 
us  would  add  very  little  to  the  expense  account  and  might,  on 
occasion,  be  of  great  use,  for  he  was  a  tower  of  strength  in  a 
tight  place,  and  it  was  not  always  possible  to  know  much  about 
the  character  of  the  men  you  had  to  hire  in  those  days. 

Well  over  one  hundred  miles  we  had  marched  and  struggled, 
sometimes  cutting  our  way  through  wearying  down  timber, 
and  then  getting  above  all  timber  lines,  and  camping  in  little 
mountain  prairies,  where  a  carpet  of  wild  flowers  sprang  up 
just  as  soon  as  the  heavy  snow  mantle  they  carried  from 
September  till  the  following  July  melted  away.  It  was  mid- 
August.  The  weather  had  been  glorious,  but  now  a  change  was 
coming.  The  wind  came  in  gusts  from  the  north,  and  before 
you  realized  what  had  happened  all  Nature  was  blotted  out  by 
such  a  blizzard  as  only  can  blow  at  10,000-feet  altitude  in  our 
Rocky  Mountains.  Fortunately  there  was  a  hollow  in  the  long 
ridge  we  had  been  riding  to  leeward  of  the  storm,  and  in  it  a 
grove  of  nut  pines.  I  will  be  held  to  exaggerate  if  I  say  that  in 
five  minutes  after  the  first  blast  of  sleet  a  horse  or  man  were 
invisible  at  twenty  yards,  but  such  is  the  truth.  I  shouted 
to  Kennedy  to  find  a  place  to  put  down  the  packs,  and  we  each 
of  us  grabbed  and  held  as  many  of  the  scared  ponies  as  we 
could.  Instinctively,  he  fixed  the  right  spot;  it  was  under  the 
upturned  root  of  a  fallen  pine.  With  its  sheltering  aid,  we 
stoutly  fastened  our  lean-to  (I  never  carried  tents),  piled  the 
ponies'  loads,  and  turned  them  loose.  Some  idea  can  be  had  of 
what  such  a  mountain  blizzard  means  when  I  say  we  did  all  that 
eight  hefty  fellows  could  do  to  find  those  horses  and  tie  them, 
but  during  the  next  three  days  we  never  saw  a  horse,  and  when, 
suddenly  as  it  had  come,  the  blizzard  passed  and  the  sun  shone 
on  us  again,  we  found  our  horses  had  never  been  at  any  time 
two  hundred  yards  from  the  lean-to  under  which  we  and  our 
belongings,  though  buried  in  deep  snow,  had  lived  just  as 
comfortably  as  possible.  Kennedy  had  a  good  eye  for  a  camp. 
Under  fierce  August  sun  the  heavy  snow  pall  melted,  but 
the  going  was  slippery  and  treacherous,  and  we  elected  to  let 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  437 

our  ponies  feed  up,  after  their  three  days'  enforced  fast,  and  to 
hunt  the  splendid  region  around  us  on  foot.  We  were  in  the 
heart  of  the  Shoshone  range,  and  from  our  blizzard  camp  made 
daily  excursions  lasting,  in  Kennedy's  case  and  mine,  from 
sun-up  to  dark. 

The  upturned  rocks  under  which  bear  searched  for  beetles 
and  larvae;  the  big,  almost  human  foot-mark,  often  showed  that 
large  grizzlies  were  about.  Still  none  of  the  party  had  yet  seen 
a  bear.  It  was  mid-day,  and  we  had  made  a  good  many  miles 
since  we  left  camp,  climbing  up  and  sliding  down  the  high 
ridges;  carefully  scanning  with  our  glasses  the  ground  in  front. 
Several  thousand  feet  below  wound  the  rushing  Shoshone 
River  (it  was  called  Stinking  Water  then,  on  account  of  some 
sulphur  springs  on  its  bank).  Just  below,  when  we  stopped  to 
lunch,  a  narrow  promontory  jutted  out  of  the  steep  mountain- 
side. Nut  pines  grew  thickly  on  it;  it  ended  in  a  sheer  precipice. 
Where  the  nut  pine  grows,1  the  mountain  squirrels  swarm;  and 
where  the  squirrels  store  their  winter  granaries,  there  the 
grizzlies  come  to  steal,  and  take  a  last  and  plentiful  feast  before 
turning  in  for  their  long  winter  sleep.  Many  such  colonies 
rudely  wrecked  we  had  seen,  but  so  far  had  never  gazed  on  the 
wrecker.  The  little  grove,  with  its  storm-twisted  pines  growing 
close  together,  was  a  likely  place,  and  very  quietly  we  slipped 
down  the  mountainside  and  into  its  shadow. 

Surely  enough,  a  big  bear  had  been  there  just  before  us. 
The  squirrels'  hoards,  though  buried  deeply,  were  scattered, 
and  the  work  of  a  large  grizzly  was  evident.  The  pines  covered 
but  a  little  space,  and  less  than  one  hundred  yards  in  front  the 
precipice  yawned;  so  very  slowly  we  crept  toward  the  brink. 
Then,  suddenly,  a  loud  Ugh,  ugh!  It  was  but  an  instant's  rush 
and  we  were  out  of  the  gloom  of  the  wood  and  in  the  clear 
space  beyond.  There,  at  last — at  last  1  On  the  very  edge  of  the 
great  gulf  the  splendid  creature  stood,  reared  to  his  full  height. 
For  an  instant  he  bends  over,  looking  into  the  gulf  below;  then 
full  round  he  wheels  and  faces  the  intruders  whose  presence  had 
tainted  the  air  of  his  undisputed  domain. 

The  sun  shone  full  on  his  dark  silvery  coat.     Such  a  picture ! 

1Our  nut  pine  is,  I  should  say,  first  cousin  to  the  Italian  tree,  so  common  in  the  Apennines,  a 
beautiful,  long-lived  tree,  capable  of  great  resistance  to  the  storm,  and  bearing  a  seed  that  tastes 
very  much  like  a  small  almond.  Excellent  little  cakes  used  to  be  made  from  these  in  Italy. 
In  our  mountains,  the  branches  are  often  much  contorted.    The  fruit  is  similar. 


438  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

And  such  a  setting!  It  was  as  though  the  very  incarnate  spirit 
of  that  savage  mountainland  stood  visible  before  us.  Then, 
growling  defiantly  and  showing  his  teeth,  he  came  on,  gathering 
pace  as  he  came,  with  a  fine  free  stride,  more  like  a  horse  than 
a  bear,  looking  full  at  us,  with  open  threatening  jaws  as  he 
galloped  by.  He  had  to  pass  us  at  a  few  yards'  distance.  The 
whole  thing  was  dramatic.  Not  if  we  had  hunted  the  wild 
Shoshone  for  a  hundred  years  could  that  glorious  land  have 
afforded  to  my  old  friend  or  to  me  a  finer  picture  of  what  for 
years  we  both  of  us  had  longed  to  see. 

As  the  bear  charged  for  safety,  Kennedy's  pent-up  soul  at 
last  found  vent.  He  dashed  his  old  hat  on  the  ground,  and, 
utterly  beside  himself,  yelled  with  all  his  lung  power:  "Look 
at  the  elk!  Look  at  the  elk!"  His  wild  glee  did  not  shake  his 
aim.  Both  our  rifles  rang  out  together,  and  without  a  shiver 
his  first  grizzly  fell  dead  as  a  stone.  You  could  cover  both 
bullet  holes  with  a  silver  dollar.  I  had  to  give  my  dear  old 
friend  the  skin. 

In  years  that  followed  I  shot  many  other  grizzlies — twenty- 
five  in  all,  three  of  them  on  that  same  trip.  But  never  again 
had  I  the  good  fortune  to  stand  face  to  face  with  such  a  beast  in 
open  day.  And,  though  two  of  them  were  larger,  nothing  I  ever 
saw  in  those  young  days,  amid  those  still  lonely  Shoshone 
Mountains,  quite  came  up  to  that  morning's  work  with  my  old 
friend.  The  scenery,  the  fine  reckless  bearing  of  that  king  of 
the  mountains,  and  the  utter  and  complete  satisfaction  of  my 
old  friend,  all  taken  together,  made  it  a  day  always  to  stand  by 
itself. 

I  have  not  quite  finished  my  story  yet.  We  were  many 
miles  from  camp,  and  the  country  between  us  and  it  was  too 
rough  for  even  one  of  my  hardy  cayuses.  So  we  must  carry 
the  head  and  skin  home  as  best  we  could.  Both  of  us  could  use 
our  skinning  knives,  and  we  had  a  rope  with  us.  Skinning  took 
more  than  an  hour,  for  a  large  grizzly  is  a  tough  proposition 
even  to  two  well-sharpened  hunting  knives.  At  last  the  job 
was  done,  as  much  of  the  heavy  white  fat  removed  as  possible, 
and  the  skin  rolled  tightly  into  a  solid  pack.  A  stout  stick 
thrust  through  into  the  fastening,  D.  K.  took  up  his  burden 
with  grim  joy,  and  we  faced  the  hard  climb  home,  I  carrying  his 
rifle. 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  439 

After  a  mile  or  so  of  hard  going  D.  K.  paused,  and  the  dead 
iweight  slipping  from  his  broad  shoulders,  he  sat  down.  He 
was  white  and  trembling.  I,  leading  the  way,  had  not  noticed 
his  state.  We  were  climbing  at  an  altitude  of  nearer  eleven 
than  ten  thousand  feet,  the  head  and  skin  weighed  over  sixty 
pounds,  we  had  no  yoke  to  spread  the  weight;  and  a  stick 
thrust  through  the  bundle  pressed  cruelly  on  the  shoulder  as  you 
carried  it.  I  sat  down  by  my  old  friend  and  did  what  I  could 
to  comfort  him.  This  was  the  first  time  in  a  long  life  that  the 
failure  of  his  natural  force  had  made  him  relinquish  a  task  he 
had  set  himself  to  accomplish.  It  went  hard  with  him.  Then, 
in  spite  of  his  protest,  I  shouldered  the  burden. 

I  was  "fit"  in  those  days,  but  that  afternoon  I  had  my  test- 
ing time.  I  knew  that  if  I  stopped  to  rest  I  could  not  possibly 
make  camp  before  dark,  and  no  man  could  travel  the  ground 
we  were  on  even  in  the  twilight.  So  I  gritted  my  teeth  and 
didn't  lay  that  load  off  for  four  hours,  till  at  last  I  stumbled  into 
our  lean-to.  I  ate  no  supper  that  night,  and  I  slept  all  the  next 
day  in  my  bed. 

Kennedy  was  of  an  earlier  time.  Our  modern  life  touched 
him  not.  He  did  not  believe  in  God;  if  he  did,  his  was  the  God 
of  the  storm  and  the  flood  and  the  earthquake — the  only  sort  of 
God  who  would  fit  into  his  scheme  of  things.  He  was  slow 
to  believe  in  any  man,  but  once  given,  his  friendship  was  un- 
alterable. If  he  was  slow  to  forgive  his  enemies  (and  he 
counted  a  good  number  of  them)  he  was  slower  to  doubt  his 
friends.  He  owned  a  fine  faithfulness  to  his  own  narrow  rule 
of  right.  When  he  saw  the  right  thing  to  do,  nothing  could 
swerve  him  from  doing  it.  He  had  lived  among  a  rough  crowd, 
but  never  was  drunk,  and  always  stood  ready  to  share  his  last 
dollar  with  one  he  trusted.  There  was  heroic  quality  about  old, 
battered  Kennedy.  I  think  he  was  the  most  utterly  unafraid 
white  man  I  ever  knew.  I  like  to  think  of  him  somewhere, 
somehow,  leading  one  of  the  multitudinous  "Forlorn  Hopes" 
of  God.  He  would  do  it  well.  There  was  that  in  him  which 
deserved  to  live  on.  Could  he  hear  it,  he  would  surely  answer 
the  challenge  of  the  Everlasting,  Browning  so  splendidly  utters: 

Bid  him  forward,  breast  and  back  as  either  should  be, 
Strive  and  thrive;  cry  speed,  fight  on,  fare  ever, 
There  as  here. 


'440  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

I  am  holiday-making  still,  and  so  have  not  much  time  to 
spend  in  those  jumping-off  places  where  I  parted  from  the 
railroad  and  mounted  my  cayuse.  Yet  since  I  visited  many 
of  them  I  must  say  something  of  those  pitiful  lost  places,  the 
railroad  shanty  towns  of  the  '8o's.  The  recklessness  and  vile- 
ness  of  the  life  lived  in  them  is  forgotten  now.  The  buffalo 
were  gone;  the  cattle  herds  were  pouring  over  the  plains,  push- 
ing even  as  far  as  the  foothills  of  the  "Main  Chain,"  and  every 
little  town  on  the  Union  Pacific  or  Northern  Pacific  road  was 
fighting  all  competitors  for  its  future  life.  I  can  write  more 
freely  if  I  leave  out  names,  but  as  a  matter  of  fact,  as  soon  as 
you  got  into  the  cattle  country,  these  towns  were  all  alike. 
Every  other  house  was  a  gambling  den  or  a  brothel,  and  when 
you  got  off  your  Pullman  car,  you  literally  fell  into  the  arms  of 
poor,  faded,  outcast  women  of  New  York  or  Chicago,  and  some 
of  the  poor  souls  had  been  beautiful  women  once. 

Your  hotel  was  a  clap-boarded  shanty.  The  noise  inside 
it  and  outside  made  sleep  difficult,  sometimes  impossible. 
More  than  once  I  was  awakened  by  shooting.  In  one  place 
where  I  came  down  in  the  morning  to  breakfast,  a  dead  man, 
with  uncovered  face,  lay  on  the  billiard  table. 

After  cattle  round-ups  hundreds  of  cowboys  would  come 
in,  hard-earned  money  in  their  pockets  (a  cowboy's  wage  was 
only  $40  a  month)  all  bent  on  having  a  good  time.  Nothing 
in  those  lost  places  for  these  poor  boys  to  do.  They  came  to 
sell;  they  stayed  to  spend — yes,  to  spend  more  than  their 
money,  even  life  itself.  In  a  few  days  money  was  gone,  and, 
alas,  health  and  youth  too  often  gone  with  it.  And  not  one 
good  woman  or  man  to  lend  a  helping  hand  or  cry  a  warning. 
Those  fine  young  things  were  a  forgotten  folk. 

At  one  of  the  worst  of  these  cattle  towns  I  found  a  mission 
of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church.  A  nice,  ignorant,  inno- 
cent young  boy,  just  ordained,  fresh  from  the  General  Theo- 
logical Seminary  in  New  York,  had  been  given  this  hell  on  earth 
for  his  first  "charge  of  souls."     Think  of  it! 

I  looked  him  up  and  asked  him  how  he  was  getting  on. 
(He  did  not  lack  courage,  that  poor  lad!  but  as  for  understand- 
ing what  he  was  up  against,  he  knew  better  what  was  inside  the 
moon.)  "Oh,  finely,"  said  he.  "I  have  cloths  for  all  the 
seasons,  and  a  bell." 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  441 

I  had  ridden  into  the  town  a  few  hours  before,  with  the  best 
part  of  an  antelope  I  had  just  shot  tied  on  my  cow  saddle.  I 
was  bringing  some  fresh  meat  to  a  household  in  the  town  where 
I  knew  it  would  be  welcome.  Everybody  was  interested  in 
everybody,  though  nobody  liked  to  appear  interested  in  any- 
body in  those  places;  and  as  I  sat  behind  a  newspaper  in  the 
shanty  hotel,  I  heard  a  cattle  man  say  to  the  landlord,  "Who 
are  those  two  men  I  saw  riding  into  town  awhile  ago;  one  of 
them  had  meat  on  his  saddle?" 

"One's  a  lawyer  and  one  is  a  preacher." 

"Which  is  the  preacher?" 

"The  big  one." 

"Why,  he  looked  big  enough  to  work  for  his  living."  I 
took  the  hint.  I  went  out  and  hired  on  my  own  account  the 
theatre  (sic)  for  the  next  afternoon,  which  was  Sunday.  Then 
I  went  to  the  local  paper  and  put  in  an  advertisement: 

The  preacher  who  came  to  town  yesterday  seemed  to  some  gentlemen 
"big  enough  to  work  for  his  living."  He  will  preach  to  all  who  care  to  hear 
him  in  the  theatre,  Sunday,  3:30.    All  seats  free. 

I  had  a  crowd,  and  one  of  the  most  attentive  and  interesting 
crowds  I  ever  addressed.  I  made  some  friends  that  afternoon. 
I  preached  in  the  same  place  for  three  successive  years,  and 
always  had  the  town. 

Oh,  a  man;  just  a  level-headed,  sympathetic,  understanding 
man,  could  have  done  immense  good  among  a  class  of  fellows 
who,  as  they  said  to  me,  "didn't  have  a  great  show."  The 
shanty  cattle  towns  soon  passed.  Some  of  them  prospered 
and  are  now  pleasant  places  to  live  in.  Livingston,  Montana, 
used  to  be  one  of  the  worst  of  them,  and  when  I  visited  it  with 
my  sons,  some  fifteen  years  ago,  I  found  three  fine  schools  and 
one  of  the  very  best  normal  schools  I  ever  set  my  foot  in. 

I  had  for  eight  years  a  little  log  cabin  in  the  heart  of  the 
Rocky  Mountains,  on  the  headwaters  of  Crandle  Creek. 
That  region  was  then,  and  is  still,  one  of  the  least  visited  parts 
of  our  beautiful  mountain  land.  The  lonely  prospector  who 
"located"  there  could  not  have  been  of  quite  the  ordinary  type, 
for  instead  of  following  the  custom  of  his  clan,  and  choosing  the 
cheapest  and  ugliest  name  to  describe  what  he  saw  around  him, 


442  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

he  called  the  lovely  spot  "Sunlight,"  and  Sunlight  it  remains 
to-day.     Several  mountain  trails  go  by  there  now. 

We  had  climbed  for  hours  the  dark,  precipitous  sides  of  a 
pine-clad  valley  which  suddenly  opened  out  into  a  little  green, 
flower-decked  prairie,  with  an  immense  red  sandstone  cliff 
closing  in  the  upper  end  of  it.  This  was  Sunlight.  At  the 
cliff's  base,  clear  and  sparkling,  ran  the  stream.  After  the 
hard,  rough  climb,  I  thought  this  unexpected  Alpine  garden 
one  of  the  most  beautiful  spots  I  had  ever  seen.  All  round  it 
Nature  was  in  savage  mood,  but  here  her  face  was  gentle  and 
her  rough  garments  had  been  laid  aside. 

Above  it,  almost  inaccessible,  steep  snowy  summits  stood 
sentinel,  and  barring  all  progress  up  the  stream,  the  great  red 
cliff  called  on  us  to  halt.  The  day's  march  had  been  hard. 
Both  horses  and  men  were  fagged.  Here  were  our  necessaries, 
feed  for  beast  and  fuel  for  man,  and  what  a  camping  place! 

We  were  making  a  trail  of  our  own  toward  the  centre  of  the 
range.  Once  already  we  had  been  beaten  by  down  timber  and 
snow,  and  had  to  turn  backward.  Now  it  seemed  we  had  come 
to  the  end  of  the  way  again.  The  great  red  cliff  looked  pro- 
hibitory. But  what  did  anything  matter  this  lovely  evening? 
The  sun  set  and  a  new  moon  rose  and  looked  down  past  the  cliff's 
edge  into  our  sheltered  resting  place.  The  day's  work  was  over, 
and  the  immediate  duty  of  the  hour  was  to  rest  and  eat. 

We  had  not  seen  a  soul  since  we  had  left  the  rail  ten  days 
before,  so  it  was  a  surprise  when  a  stranger  came  quietly  out 
of  the  gloom  and  squatted  on  his  heels,  as  mountain  men 
always  did,  at  the  fire.  He  had  pushed  up  the  creek  prospect- 
ing, some  years  before.  An  early  storm  had  snowed  him  in, 
but  he  found  good  feed  for  his  horses  in  the  "Basin,"  so  he 
built  him  a  log  shanty,  stayed  all  winter,  and  preempted  the 
place.  He  was  tired  now  of  loneliness  and  wanted  to  sell  out. 
I  had  then  no  idea  of  buying,  and  when  next  day  he  showed  us 
the  narrow  trail  round  the  base  of  the  great  cliff  that  led  up  to 
the  "divide,"  he  begged  me  to  remember  his  desire  and  help 
him  out. 

The  visit  of  the  owner  of  Sunlight  was  not  the  only  surprise 
we  had.  Some  little  time  after  another  and  a  wilder  sort  of 
man  turned  up  at  the  fire  one  evening.  As  it  turned  out, 
Frank  C.  was  to  be  my  trusted  guide  and  teacher  in  mountain 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  443 

ways  on  many  a  trip  and  for  many  a  happy  day.  He  was  only 
a  lad,  just  twenty-one,  but  hardship  had  told  on  him;  he 
looked  years  older.  He  could  stride  up  a  mountain  slope  at 
an  altitude  of  over  ten  thousand  feet,  and  keep  his  pipe  alight 
as  he  did  so  (an  almost  impossible  thing  to  do).  I  have  seen 
him  race  up  such  slopes  for  several  hundred  yards  to  get  a 
second  shot  at  wounded  game;  and  finally,  he  was  the  best 
rifle  shot  I  ever  shot  with.  He  had  run  away  from  his  home  in 
Nebraska  at  sixteen,  and  had  worked  his  way  to  the  land  of  his 
dreams.  When  he  had  cash  enough  to  buy  a  rifle  and  a  pack- 
horse,  he  started  to  make  a  living  by  hunting  "meat"  for  a  small 
mining  town  on  Clark's  Fork,  in  an  out-of-the-way  corner  of 
Montana. 

When  Frank  struck  our  outfit  he  was  in  bad  luck.  Clark's 
Fork  was  a  failure  as  a  mining  camp,  and  the  increasing  dis- 
tance he  had  to  travel  to  kill  and  then  to  sell  the  meat  made  a 
usually  precarious  business  a  hopelessly  bad  one.  Thus  it 
came  about  that  Frank  was  open  to  an  offer,  and  since  he 
seemed  to  be  just  the  sort  of  man  I  needed,  I  made  him  one 
promptly,  and  it  was  as  promptly  accepted. 

I  wanted  a  "mountain  man,"  a  man  who,  before  all  things, 
loved  to  live  in  the  mountains.  Such  hermits  of  the  wild  were 
not  rare,  but  they  hugged  their  solitary  independence,  and 
would  seldom  consider  an  engagement.  Loafers  round  the 
railroad  who  could  "rope"  and  "pack"  and  ride  there  were 
a-plenty,  but  you  had  no  guarantee  that  they  would  stay  with 
you,  or  that  the  first  time  they  were  full  of  whiskey  you  might 
not  have  a  dangerous  fight  on  your  hands.  In  short,  the 
difficulty  I  had  to  overcome,  if  my  mountain  wanderings  were 
to  be  a  success,  was  that  of  finding  reliable  men.  They  were 
indeed  hard  to  find,  and  one  bad  fellow  could  spoil  the  trip  for 
all  the  party.  A  good  reason  for  taking  my  sturdy  David  K. 
along,  when  J.  P.  Morgan,  Jr.,  came,  with  me,  had  been  to  have 
a  stout  arm  to  rely  on  if  any  difficulty  arose  with  hired  men. 
Later,  outfitting  parties  who  wished  to  camp  in  the  mountains 
became  a  recognized  business,  and  at  many  points  men  and 
pack-trains  could  be  engaged;  but  for  serious  mountain  travel 
it  always  was  difficult  to  procure  men  and  beasts  fitted  for  work; 
and  success  in  any  wild  land  depends  on,  first  your  knowledge  of 
what  you  want,  and  next  on  the  care  you  take  in  procuring  it. 


444  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

After  a  short  trial  I  found  I  had  in  Frank  just  what  I  wanted. 
I  made  him  an  offer.  He  was  to  go  back  to  Sunlight  as  soon 
as  he  left  me  at  the  railroad,  and  try  to  buy  the  place.  If  he 
got  ranch  and  ponies  reasonably,  I  would  send  him  the  cash. 
The  offer  delighted  him.  Sunlight  was  just  the  sort  of  place 
he  longed  for,  well  situated  for  trapping.  I  would  "grub 
stake"  him  till  spring,  and  next  July  he  would  meet  me  at  the 
railroad  with  saddle  ponies  and  pack-train. 

In  due  time  I  had  an  excellent  account  of  his  stewardship. 
He  bought  the  place  and  forty  ponies,  some  of  them  excellent 
saddle  ponies,  for  $400.  I  never  made  another  bargain  like 
that  in  my  life. 

Frank  knew  the  mountains  by  heart.  He  never  got  into 
inextricably  bad  places,  either  with  horses  or  on  foot;  he  was 
a  wonderful  man  on  bad  ground.  He  knew  where  to  look  for 
game,  and  how  to  track  it.  He  so  completely  exterminated  the 
bears  round  Sunlight  (he  shot  one  hundred  and  four,  in  all, 
while  in  my  employ)  that  I  never  killed  one  near  the  ranch  my- 
self. 

Let  me  say  here,  he  exploded  for  me  the  commonly  received 
opinion  that  the  grizzly  was  a  wilfully  dangerous  customer. 
He  declared  that  he  never  had  been  charged  by  one.  Grizzly 
bears  have  habits  (better  say  had,  for  the  grizzly  has  passed), 
it  may  be  admitted,  that  are  not  readily  understood  by  those 
who  have  not  studied  them.  One  of  the  strangest  is,  that  if 
shot  at  from  below,  when  they  are  travelling  a  mountain,  turning 
over  stones  as  they  go  in  order  to  feed  on  the  larvae  beneath,  they 
will  roll  head  over  heels,  literally  in  a  bear  ball,  down  the  steep 
slope  toward  the  safer  cover  far  below.  If  a  man  is  in  the  way, 
as  they  roll  and  rush  past,  he  might  be  hurt.  I  once  saw  Frank 
almost  wiped  in  that  way  by  a  bear  that  came  rolling,  tumbling, 
growling  (literally,  it  looked  more  like  a  great  football  than 
anything  else)  at  an  amazing  pace,  right  down  the  middle  of  a 
steep  mountain  washout. 

Frank  had  Junius  Morgan  out  with  him  that  day.  They 
saw  through  their  glasses  a  grizzly  a  good  way  above  them 
feeding  among  the  loose  stones  of  the  high  slope  in  the  usual 
way.  They  went  up  after  him,  and  J.  M.  was  a  fairly  good 
climber,  but  having  got  within  shooting  distance  of  the  bear, 
J.  M.  could  not  get  any  nearer.     The  going  was  hard,  and  it  was 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  445 

shoot  then  or  not  at  all.  He  shot  and  missed.  The  pace  that 
bear  came  at,  down  that  gully,  was  really  scaring.  There  was 
no  time  for  a  second  shot.  Both  men  leaped  up  the  sides  of 
the  gully,  and  promptly  and  most  wisely  gave  that  bear  the 
right  of  way.  But  to  say  that  bear  charged  them  would  be 
untrue. 

I  was  charged,  and  not  charged,  by  a  fine  bear  on  my  next 
trip.  I  had  shot  an  elk  at  a  distance  from  the  main  camp,  in  a 
very  likely  looking  place,  as  bear  bait.  I  did  not  go  near  it  for 
a  week.  Then,  starting  early  one  morning,  I  rode  off  to  see  if 
I  had  had  a  visitor.  The  carcass  lay  in  a  dark,  steep  valley, 
where  pine  trees  stood  close  together,  and  blazes  on  the  trees 
marked  a  path  to  my  "kill."  As  soon  as  I  got  among  the 
pines,  there  were  bear  signs.  And  when  I  came  in  sight  of  the 
spot  where  my  elk  lay,  I  was  confused  for  a  moment  by  the 
changes  that  had  taken  place.  In  the  dim  light  I  saw  an  im- 
mense mound  of  earth  and  stones,  even  one  tree  stump  was 
there,  piled  on  top  of  the  bait.  I  drew  near  it,  one  foot  at  a  time, 
and  looking  everywhere  for  some  sign  of  the  author  of  this  up- 
heaval, who  I  knew  must  be  close  by.  I  could  see  nothing.  I 
was  only  a  few  feet  from  the  mound  when,  from  the  earth  itself 
it  seemed,  came  a  grunting  roar,  and  right  over  the  mound,  from 
the  off  side,  rushed  a  great  beast  and  threw  himself  on  me.  Or 
he  would  have  tumbled  on  me,  whether  he  wished  to  or  not,  for 
he  could  not  possibly  have  stopped  himself  in  the  short  space, 
if  I  had  not  shot  and  shot  quickly. 

What  had  happened  was  this:  the  grizzly  heard  our  soft 
treading  as  he  lay  dozing  behind  his  "cash."  He  was  sure 
another  bear  was  threatening  his  store,  and  so  hurled  himself 
forward  to  defend  his  treasure.  I  thought — was  it  fancy? — 
that  in  that  fraction  of  a  second  of  time  I  could  see  in  his  face 
surprise  more  than  fury.  But  the  circumstances  did  not  favour 
further  analysis  of  motive,  and  I  shot  just  as  quick  and  straight 
as  I  knew  how.  He  was  only  some  few  feet  from  my  rifle 
muzzle,  and  he  tumbled  down  the  mound  to  my  very  foot, 
stone  dead. 

Another  fine  grizzly  I  got  in  an  unusual  way;  the  largest 
I  ever  saw  in  the  mountains  save  one — that,  of  course,  I  missed. 

Frank  and  I  had  gone,  as  we  often  did,  away  from  the  main 
camp  for  a  couple  of  nights,  prospecting  for  new  country.     At 


446  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

evening  I  left  him  to  get  our  little  fire  going  and  cook  supper 
and  went  along  a  high  ridge  for  a  mile  or  two  before  sunset. 
When  it  was  growing  dark  I  turned  back.  I  had  gone  farther 
than  I  intended,  and  was  going  carefully  along  the  ridge  toward 
camp,  when,  in  the  darkness,  which  by  now  was  complete,  a 
great  black  shape  suddenly  reared  itself  up  in  my  very  face. 
There  was  no  breath  of  wind;  I  had  made  no  noise,  nor  had  the 
bear.  I  had  not  even  time  to  put  my  rifle  to  my  shoulder,,  so 
close  was  he,  but  shot  into  him  without  raising  it.  The  flash 
blinded  me;  I  could  see  nothing,  and  on  the  instant  I  made  a 
jump  forward  to  clear  my  own  smoke  and  get  another  shot,  for 
I  took  for  granted  that  he  had  rolled  down  the  steep  incline. 
As  I  did  so  a  heavy  blow  knocked  both  my  legs  clean  from 
under  me.  When  I  hit  the  ground  I  took  no  chances,  but  rolled 
just  as  fast  as  I  could  for  quite  a  bit.  When  I  got  up,  I  still 
had  my  rifle,  but  I  could  neither  hear  nor  see  any  sign  of  the 
bear.  A  wounded  bear  in  pitchy  darkness  was  something  I 
had  no  interest  in  just  then,  and  so,  with  many  a  look  into  the 
blackness,  I  made  my  way  to  camp.  My  leg  was  bruised  but 
usable. 

Soon  I  made  out  the  welcome  spark  of  fire,  where  amid  the 
nut  pines  Frank  had  made  camp.  And  wasn't  I  glad  to  see  it ! 
Frank:  "What  were  you  shooting  at  up  there  on  the  divide?" 
W.  S.  R. :  "I  ran  right  up  against  a  big  bear,  a  very  big  bear, 

in  the  darkness." 
Frank:         "No,  you  didn't?" 
W.  S.  R.    "I  tell  you  I  did.     I  hit  him,  too,  and  he  knocked 

me  over." 
This  was  too  much  of  a  bear  story.  I  didn't  blame  Frank 
for  not  believing  one  word  of  it.  Knocked  down  by  a  big 
grizzly,  and  yet  able  to  walk  quite  a  way  back  to  camp.  Frank 
said  nothing  more,  but  went  on  getting  supper  ready.  Before 
sun-up  next  morning  he  brought  in  the  hobbled  ponies.  We 
packed  our  few  things,  had  our  breakfast,  and  were  ready  to 
start  back  to  camp.  Frank,  of  course,  always  led  the  way,  lead- 
ing our  pack-pony,  and  I  had  hard  enough  work  now  to  make 
him  wait  till  I  could  go  to  the  ridge  above  us  and  look  over  the 
site  of  my  evening  escapade.  Frank  remained  rather  sulkily 
waiting  my  return,  resenting  what  he  fancied  was  an  effort  to 
fool  him.     When,  after  a  scramble,  I  reached  the  spot,  I  could 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  447 

scarcely  believe  in  my  luck  when  I  saw  it.  There  lay  the 
biggest  grizzly  I  had  yet  seen.  Indeed,  he  was  the  biggest  I 
ever  saw,  except  one.  He  was  nine  feet  three  inches  between 
pegs,1  and  must  have  weighed  seven  hundred  pounds. 

What  had  happened  was  that  when  I  jumped  forward  the 
bear  gave  as  he  fell  a  convulsive  kick  with  his  hind  legs,  and 
these  swept  my  legs  from  under  me  as  though  I  had  been  swept 
out  of  my  saddle  by  a  branch. 

It  is  thirty  years  since  I  saw  Sunlight,  but  as  I  sit  before 
my  fire  in  the  evening,  or  as  I  look  at  some  of  the  big  Wapiti  or 
sheep  heads  I  brought  back  from  it,  I  can  see  it  still. 

The  night  gives  back  the  double  day  which  clothed  the  earth  when  I  was 
young. 

If  I  were  an  artist,  I  could  draw  the  outline  of  cliff  and  canon 
now.  It  is  thirty  years  since  I  sat  at  the  little  cabin  door  and 
watched  the  shadows  fill  the  valley  in  the  evening,  or  looked  at 
sunrise  for  the  Big  Horn,  who  would  show  against  the  skyline 
as  they  looked  down  on  the  cabin  from  the  edge  of  the  great 
red  cliff. 

The  last  trip  we  had  together  I  saw  a  change  in  my  friend. 
He  was  restless  and  morose  at  times,  not  like  himself.  At 
Clark's  Fork  camp,  as  we  passed  through,  he  introduced  me  to 
a  woman  friend.  Poor  thing,  the  class  she  belonged  to  was  too 
evident.  Next  year  I  was  ill.  There  was  no  Rocky  Mountain 
trip  for  me,  but  my  friend  Doctor  Nevin  of  Rome  wanted  to  go 
hunting,  so  I  loaned  him  my  riding  ponies  and  "packs,"  and 
told  him  to  hire  Frank,  which  he  did. 

When  he  came  back  after  the  trip  he  told  me  that  Frank 
had  married,  and  had  insisted  on  taking  his  wife  along,  and 
that  they  quarrelled  perpetually.  I  also  found  Frank  had 
charged  him  for  the  use  of  my  ponies.  This  was  not  honest, 
and  I  felt  things  had  indeed  gone  utterly  wrong  at  Sunlight.  I 
wrote  to  Frank  the  best  letter  I  could.  It  was  of  no  use.  I 
had  in  reply  a  disjointed  scrawl,  saying  that  after  these  years  he 
thought  he  had  a  right  to  the  ranch;  he  had  had  it  surveyed, 
and  now  claimed  it  as  his  own.     A  few  months  later  came  one 

JThe  correct  method  of  measuring  the  length  of  game  requires  that  a  peg  be  driven  into  the 
ground  at  the  nose,  another  at  the  heel  of  an  animal.  The  distance  between  such  pegs  is  the 
height  or  length.  To  run  the  tape  along  the  line  of  the  body  is  not  an  accepted  measurement. 
Of  course  skin  measurements  are  wholly  useless.     A  skin  can  be  stretched. 


448  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

more  pitiful  scrawl.     "He  was  very  ill,  feared  he  was  dying. 
He  had  done  wrong.     Would  I  forgive  him?" 

So,  at  twenty-seven,  only  twenty-seven,  Frank  died.  Died 
of  that  strange  disease  which,  lacking  a  better  name,  they  call 
mountain  fever,  and  under  the  great  cliff  at  Sunlight  they 
buried  him.  He  had  fine  stuff  in  him,  but  he  was  one  of  those 
many  who  lived  in  hard  luck.  He  never  knew  but  one  woman, 
and  she  ruined  him.  "Who  maketh  thee  to  differ,  or  what  hast 
thou  that  thou  didst  not  receive?"  (I  Cor.  iv,  7.) 

I  have  tramped  through  the  best  mountain  scenery  in  Europe. 
I  have  camped  among  the  rugged  peaks  of  the  Dolomites  in 
Austria,  where  I  hunted  chamois,  the  hardest  hunting  I  ever 
did.  I  have  followed  the  rare  moufflon  among  the  lovely 
valleys  and  heather-clad  slopes  of  snowy  Girgenti  in  Sardinia, 
where  great  fields  of  crocuses  are  purple  and  golden  as  they 
push  their  hardy  heads  out  of  the  snow  in  spring.  But  give 
me  our  own  mountain  land  before  any  other. 

The  lavish  splendour  of  its  flowers,  the  unmatched,  rugged 
grandeur  of  its  canons  and  cliffs!  Europe  was  nothing  to 
compare  with  them.  Many  now  make  holiday  among  our 
Rockies,  but  still  the  best  is  unknown.  Few  leave  the  beaten 
paths,  contenting  themselves  with  hasty  visits  to  the  Yellow- 
stone or  Glacier  parks. 

Of  many  places  wonderful  in  their  beauty  I  recall  two  that  I 
sometimes  went  out  of  my  way  to  visit,  when  pushing  up  from 
the  Northern  Pacific  Railroad  to  my  little  ranch.  I  choose 
them  as  they  are  comparatively  easy  of  access. 

On  the  road  to  Cook  mines  (I  believe  they  are  now  aban- 
doned), a  long  valley  of  some  twenty-five  miles  leads  easily  up 
to  the  divide  from  the  east  fork  of  the  Yellowstone,  narrowing 
as  it  rises.  Some  eight  miles  from  the  mines,  on  the  left  hand 
as  you  ascend,  a  vast  wall  of  basalt  rises  sheer  from  the  bed  of 
the  stream.  It  cannot  be  much  less  than  four  thousand 
feet  in  height,  and  is  a  long  mile  at  its  base. 

When  first  I  looked  up  at  it,  its  great  dark  breast  was  braided 
all  over  with  a  hundred  milky,  wavy,  flashing  waterfalls.  For 
a  week  we  had  had  almost  continuous  rain,  and  these  warm 
showers,  for  it  was  July,  had  hastened  the  destruction  of  the 
snow  beds  on  its  crown,  and  down  to  the  valley  fell  or  trickled 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  449 

literally  hundreds  of  streams,  separating,  spreading,  uniting, 
and  spreading  again,  as  they  crept  or  thundered  downward. 

No  words  can  convey  any  idea  of  the  mingled  beauty  and 
grandeur  of  falling  water  and  immovable  basalt  when  smitten 
by  the  glory  of  the  setting  sun. 

One  autumn  evening,  two  years  later,  we  camped  at  the  same 
spot.  We  were  smoking  the  last  pipe  of  peace  before  turning 
in  when  one  of  our  party  noticed  a  clear  light  falling  on  the 
summit  above  us.  As  we  watched,  the  light  crept  slowly  down- 
ward. At  first  we  scarcely  realized  that  it  was  the  moon. 
We  were  down,  remember,  in  a  veritable .  chasm,  one  side  of 
which,  the  side  facing  us,  was  three  thousand  feet  higher  than 
the  other,  and  thus  the  moonbeams  lit  up  its  edge  long  before 
they  reached  the  little  prairie  at  its  foot,  where  our  camp  lay. 
A  great  belt  of  clouds  lay  on  the  rocky  ridge  at  our  back,  and 
athwart  these  the  moonlight  passed,  casting  their  moving 
shadows  on  the  great  gray  mirror  we  were  looking  up  at. 
What  grotesque  shapes  they  took  as  they  wound  and  unwound 
their  long  folds!  There  we  sat  and  watched  them,  till  at  last 
such  moonlight  as  you  can  only  see  on  the  desert,  or  when  you 
are  thousands  of  feet  above  the  damper,  denser  air  in  which 
ordinary  life  is  passed,  fell  full  into  the  gorge. 

I  recall  another  bit  of  Rocky  Mountain  scenery.  I  single  it 
out  of  a  possible  many  because,  like  the  first,  it  is  accessible 
to  the  traveller.  I  refer  to  the  mouth  of  Clark's  Fork  Canyon. 
This  canyon,  in  my  judgment,  is  in  every  way  finer,  deeper, 
grander  than  the  Canyon  of  the  Yellowstone,  and,  though  but 
sixty  miles  from  the  Northern  Pacific  railroad,  is  seldom  visited. 

Sheer  from  the  water,  without  one  break  on  its  face,  a  silvery 
cliff,  looking  almost  south,  rises  five  thousand  feet  into  the  sky. 
I  do  not  know  the  nature  of  its  formation,  but  in  the  sunlight 
its  sheen  is  most  silvery.  Right  opposite  it  stands  a  mountain 
so  rocky  and  precipitous  that  no  man  or  beast  can  ascend  it. 
And  this  is  as  dark  as  her  brother  sentinel  is  fair. 

I  saw  these  one  early  morning  in  September,  when  I  had 
turned  unwillingly  homeward,  resisting  the  strong  temptation 
of  a  first  tracking  snow.  Saw  them  all  crusted  and  crowned 
with  their  first  winter  icing.  As  we  rode,  we  were  not  a  mile 
from  their  bases,  yet  these  were  absolutely  invisible,  shut  out 
by  a  dense  white  wall  of  mist.     But  their  heads,  for  the  top- 


450  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

most  thousand  feet  or  so,  stood  out  clear  as  morning  sunlight 
could  make  them. 

An  ordinary  hill  of  a  couple  of  thousand  feet  looks  Alpine 
when  you  are  near  its  base,  if  that  base  be  hidden  in  fog  and 
the  crown  be  clear.  Many  who  read  this  can  doubtless  recall 
experiences  on  misty  mornings  when,  from  canoe  or  on  lake 
shore  or  river  bank,  they  looked  up  at  cloud-girdled  mountains 
that,  when  thus  seen,  seemed  so  vast  in  their  proportions  that 
they  could  scarcely  believe  them  to  be  the  old  companions  of  the 
night  before.  But  these  rocky  sentinels,  seen  as  I  saw  them 
that  morning — I  can  liken  them  to  nothing  I  know  of.  We 
were  not  an  especially  emotional  party,  but  they  did  seem  to  us 
that  morning,  as  they  towered  aloft  into  the  limitless  ether,  to 
belong  to  another  "land  that  is  very  far  off." 

Hunting  the  grizzly  fascinated  me.  I  found  him  the  hardest 
of  all  animals  to  approach,  excepting  perhaps  the  sheep,  and 
the  extreme  difficulty  of  seeing  him,  and  the  lonely  haunts  he 
had  retired  to,  made  him  more  difficult  to  bring  to  bag  than 
even  the  Big  Horn.  I  shot  twenty-five  grizzlies  in  all,  but  not 
one  after  1891.  In  1903  (I  think),  I  took  my  sons  on  one  last, 
grand  hunt,  our  last  camping  out  together  before  duty  called 
each  to  take  up  his  profession,  and  so  bid  good-bye  to  boyhood's 
holidays  with  his  father.  I  took  them  through  the  very  best  of 
the  hunting  country  in  the  United  States.  We  had  a  fine 
"outfit,"  and  right  up  the  centre  of  our  mountain  land  we  went, 
from  the  Wind  River  Mountains  to  northern  Wyoming. 

We  had  splendid  weather,  and  often  good  tracking  snow;  and 
yet,  in  those  two  months,  none  of  us  ever  even  saw  the  track 
of  a  reasonably  large  bear. 

I  got  some  of  my  bear  by  watching  near  a  bait  in  the  late 
evening.  Sometimes  I  sat  up  all  night,  wrapped  in  my  buffalo 
robe.  Of  such  evenings  and  nights  I  retain  vivid  memory  still. 
One  such  experience  I  have  especially  in  mind.  What  an 
evening  it  was,  both  for  its  beauty  and  its  good  fortune! 

My  watching  place  was  on  the  edge  of  a  little  mountain 
prairie.  Fully  two  thousand  feet  below  the  head  waters  of  the 
Snake  gathered  themselves,  and  in  its  infancy  the  great  river 
sent  up  its  baby  murmur.  Behind  me  the  giant  heads  of  the 
Teton  cut  the  rosy  evening  sky,  sharp  and  clear  as  does  the 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  451 

last  thousand  feet  of  the  Matterhorn.  I  was  comfortably  en- 
sconced in  the  warm  brown  pine-needles  that  smothered  up 
the  great  knees  of  a  gnarled  nut  pine  whose  roots  offered  me  an 
armchair.  Round  me,  for  the  space  of  two  or  three  acres, 
the  short,  crisp  greensward  that  is  only  found  where  snow  has 
lain  for  months  was  spangled  and  starred  all  over  with  such 
blue  and  white  and  red  mountain  flowers  as  are  nowhere  else 
seen. 

There  is  nothing  quite  so  beautiful  in  any  other  Alpine  land  I 
know  of.  I  have  counted  in  one  long  day's  ramble  very  nearly 
one  hundred  different  flowers  in  bloom.  I  have  tried  to  equal 
that  accounting  in  the  Austrian  Dolomites,  whose  flora  is 
the  richest  in  Europe  I  believe,  but  have  never  been  able  to 
approach  my  Rocky  Mountain  record. 

Amid  the  lush  green  of  the  upper  mountain  prairies  great 
masses  of  harebell  and  borage  and  gentian  carpet  the  ground. 
Here  and  there,  contrasting  with  their  vivid  blue,  wide  plots  of 
yellow,  purple-centred  sunflowers,  stoutly  hold  up  their 
heads,  while  on  the  borderland  of  these  natural  flower-beds, 
where  the  grass  shortens  in  blade  and  deepens  to  an  intenser 
green,  the  delicate  mountain  lily,  with  its  three  pure-white 
petals  fading  to  a  tender  green  at  the  centre,  reaches  its  modest 
height  of  some  nine  inches. 

This  evening  my  armchair  not  only  commanded  this  prairie 
garden,  but  the  heads  of  two  deep  ravines  leading  to  it;  where 
these  met  lay  my  bear  bait,  an  elk  shot  some  ten  days  before. 
Hour  after  hour  passed  peacefully  by.  I  had  a  pocket  volume 
of  Tennyson,  and  I  tried  with  poor  success  to  read  it,  so  gave 
myself  up  to  the  beauty  of  the  scene.  At  such  a  time  one 
realizes  what  a  blissful  thing  it  is  just  to  be.  Such  hours  do 
not  come  to  any  of  us  often,  but  when  they  do,  with  them 
surely  may  come  an  overmastering  sense  of  that  Presence 
Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning  feels  when  she  writes: 

Earth's  crammed  with  heaven, 
And  every  common  bush  afire  with  God; 
But  only  he  who  sees  takes  off  his  shoes. 

Without  cant,  I  think  that  evening  I  took  off  mine,  as  the 
old  prayer  came  to  mind:  "We  thank  Thee  for  our  creation, 
preservation,  and  all  the  blessings  of  this  life." 


452  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

I  was  in  a  state  of  stable  equilibrium,  bodily  and  mental,  when 
a  mighty  rumpus  arose  at  the  edge  of  the  dark  woods  below  me, 
where  Frank's  horse  and  mine  were  lariated.  On  his  way  up- 
ward from  the  gulch  a  big  grizzly  had  been  joined  by  a  relative, 
and  both,  drawn  by  the  scent  of  the  dead  elk  that  I  have  already 
mentioned,  came  suddenly  on  the  horses,  hidden  and  securely 
tied  in  a  little  hollow.  The  horses  shrieked  in  terror  as  they 
found  themselves  face  to  face  with  the  bears. 

I  could  see  nothing  from  where  I  sat,  but  running  down  a  few 
yards  I  came  in  sight  of  two  sturdy  fellows  sitting  up  on  their 
haunches,  and  surveying  our  plunging  nags.  For  a  moment 
they  evidently  held  a  hurried  consultation.  The  conclusion 
they  arrived  at  was  that  they  were  out  for  venison,  not  for 
horse-flesh;  more  especially  as  there  was  a  dangerous  smell 
around.  In  brief,  they  struck  our  trail,  and  scented  our  sad- 
dles, and  so,  without  loss  of  time,  were  off  up  wind. 

Frank  was  a  quarter  of  a  mile  away,  at  the  other  side  of  the 
prairie,  so  the  chance  was  mine.  As  they  made  good  time 
quartering  up  hill,  they  gave  me  a  long  running  shot.  Sit 
down  when  you  shoot,  if  it  is  possible.  No  position  so  good; 
an  elbow  on  either  knee.  You  can  shoot  fast  and  straight, 
and  the  position  is  high  enough  to  carry  head  and  rifle  above 
small  irregularities  of  the  ground.  I  let  drive  and  missed — 
shot  too  far  ahead.  Always  shoot  too  far  ahead  rather  than 
too  far  behind.  Sometimes  a  bullet  plumped  in  front  of 
running  game  will  halt  it  for  a  moment,  and  so  it  now  turned 
out.  The  leader  reared  up  for  an  instant,  and  the  pause  was 
fatal.  The  next  bullet  took  him  fairly  in  the  heart.  He  had 
just  time  to  give  his  solicitous  companion  a  wipe  with  his  paw1 
that  would  have  come  near  wiping  out  a  strong  man,  when  he 
rolled  over,  dead. 

Bear  number  two  I  got  with  my  third  shot.  There  they  lay, 
not  fifty  yards  apart,  two  in  one  evening.  Honestly  it  must 
be  confessed  that  such  shots  were  more  than  ordinarily  lucky. 

Skinning  such  tough  hides  is  very  trying  work,  but  how 
willingly  was  it  undertaken!  And  then  what  time  we  made 
down  the  mountain,  tying  first  our  splendid  trophies,  heads  on, 

*I  have  seen  a  wounded  bear  do  this  more  than  once.  I  have  seen  a  wounded  wolf  do  the 
same.  Lions  I  have  never  seen  do  it — and  of  course  wounded  elephants  will  court  danger  to  help 
their  wounded. 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  453 

securely  on  the  cow  saddles.  What  cannot  a  good  "bronco" 
do  when  he  wants  to  get  back  to  the  herd,  and  when  he  is  getting 
out  of  a  dark  wood  where  he  has  suffered  the  scare  of  his  life? 
For  a  couple  of  thousand  feet  we  led  our  horses  down  the  steep 
incline.  Then  more  than  three  miles  of  heavy  down  timber, 
and  not  a  ghost  of  a  trail.  The  sure-footedness  of  a  well- 
trained  pony  in  the  midst  of  such  going  is  only  less  wonderful 
than  the  way  in  which,  with  his  head  now  and  then  stretched 
to  the  very  ground,  he  smells  out  the  trail  he  has  come  over  like 
a  well-trained  hound.  All  ponies  cannot  do  this,  but  the  one 
I  always  rode  never  in  eight  years  failed  me.  He  would 
steadily  travel  an  unmarked  trail,  in  dense  wood,  and  amid 
slippery  rock,  that  he  and  I  had  forced  way  through  or  over 
weeks  before.  Many  an  evening  did  I  race  him  home.  Knot- 
ting my  reins  on  his  neck,  and  covering  my  face  with  arms  and 
hands  against  the  sharp  branches  of  the  forest,  we  passed 
rapidly  through.     (And  I  gave  $25  for  that  bronco !) 

Once  out  of  the  timber  we  could  sober  down,  for  all  was  plain 
sailing.  Three  or  four  miles  more,  among  beaver  meadows 
where,  every  now  and  then,  we  heard,  as  loud  almost  as  a 
pistol  shot,  the  beaver  smite  the  water  with  broad  tail  as  he 
went  down  into  his  own  quiet  clear  pool — and  then  the  wel- 
come blaze  of  the  camp-fire,  promising  rest  as  well  as  good 
companionship. 

Not  a  great  many  marches  from  Sunlight,  we  had  stumbled 
on  an  interesting  discovery.  We  found  the  place  where  Chief 
Joseph  succeeded  in  hiding  what  remained  of  his  Utes,  till 
exhausted  people  and  ponies  won  a  brief  rest  before  making 
their  last  dash  for  the  Canadian  border.  The  story  of  the  last 
Ute  war  is  a  story  shameful  to  the  United  States.  The 
Utes  were  the  best  Indians  we  clashed  with.  They  kept 
their  promises  as  regularly  as  the  United  States  broke  hers. 
They  were  made  the  victims  not  only  of  the  shameful  corrup- 
tion and  incapacity  of  the  Interior  Department,  under  Presi- 
dent Grant's  administration,  but  of  a  still  less  excusable  breach 
of  faith  by  the  Government  itself. 

Chief  Joseph's  march  from  the  barren  reservation  assigned 
his  tribe  to  the  Canadian  border,  the  best  military  authorities 
agree,  was  a  first-class  feat  of  war.  Three  columns  of  United 
States  troops  were  in  pursuit  of  the  Indians,  and  each  column 


454  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

outnumbered  the  fighting  force  of  the  Utes.  The  famous  5  th 
Infantry,  General  Miles's  regiment,  had  been  called  into  the 
field  as  mounted  infantry,  and  their  part  was  to  cut  off  the 
Utes  from  the  Canadian  line.  I  had  had  the  great  good  for- 
tune to  be  welcomed  by  the  officers  of  this  regiment,  and  had 
been  their  guest  on  several  occasions.  So  on  my  way  East, 
after  the  discovery  I  have  referred  to,  I  was  anxious  to  tell  my 
friends  at  Fort  Keogh  about  it. 

I  stayed  at  the  quarters  of  Major  R.,  whom  I  knew  well. 
He  was  a  silent  man,  seldom  speaking  of  himself,  or  of  the  many 
battles  during  the  Civil  War  in  which  he  had  been  engaged; 
but  one  night,  as  we  sat  up  late  and  alone,  he  told  me  the  story 
I  greatly  wanted  to  hear:  the  story  of  the  last  stand  the  Utes 
made,  and  of  his  almost  mortal  wounding. 

The  regiment  was  mounted,  and  it  pressed  the  retreating 
Utes  so  fiercely  that,  once  more,  they  stood  at  bay,  in  terribly 
cold  and  snowy  weather.  There  was  scarcely  time  given 
them  to  throw  up  a  low  line  of  cover  when  they  were  charged. 
With  admirable  discipline,  the  Indians  held  their  fire  till  the 
mounted  men  were  close  to  the  rifles,  and  then,  with  one  ter- 
rible, accurate  volley,  they  emptied  sixty  saddles. 

Before  the  shaken  squadron  could  reform,  night  fell.  R., 
leading  his  men,  was  shot  through  the  lungs,  and  lay  in  front 
of  the  Indians'  line,  too  far  from  his  command  to  receive  aid. 
How  long  he  lay,  almost  unconscious,  he  did  not  know,  but 
as  the  first  shock  of  his  wounding  wore  off,  he  realized  where 
he  was,  and  believing  himself  dying,  commended  his  wife  and 
children  and  himself  to  God.  The  cold  was  awful,  but  the 
burning  thirst,  caused  by  the  loss  of  blood  that  had  poured 
from  the  wound  of  a  45-calibre  bullet  clear  through  his  lung, 
was  worse.  And  so  paralyzed  was  his  whole  body  that  he 
could  not  even  moisten  his  lips  with  the  snow. 

He  was  fast  lapsing  into  unconsciousness  when  he  was  aware 
of  something  crawling  toward  him  through  the  snow.  He 
could  not  move  an  inch,  but  he  could  see  it  coming,  nearer  and 
nearer.  Was  it  a  wolf?  The  terror  of  it  brought  him  partly 
back  to  life.  Still  nearer  it  came.  And  now  he  saw  it  clearly. 
It  was  a  crawling  Ute. 

Then  he  knew  his  last  hour  had  come.  He  made  a  prayer 
and  closed  his  eyes,  waiting  to  feel  the  steel  at  his  throat.    He 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  455 

thought  that  he  had  bidden  good-bye  to  life;  that  he  was  ready 
for  death;  but  the  horror  of  that  moment,  the  Major  said, 
passed  all  his  power  to  describe.  He  felt  the  Indian  touch  him. 
He  could  not  plead  for  his  life.  He  could  not  even  moan. 
Then — he  felt  an  arm  passed  under  his  head;  it  was  lifted 
gently;  a  cup  of  water  was  pressed  to  his  lips,  and  he  drank. 
Then  his  saviour  crawled  away,  silently  as  he  had  come. 

"Then  I  knew  I  would  live,"  said  my  friend,  "and  life 
seemed  very  sweet  to  me." 

When  at  length  Chief  Joseph  surrendered,  some  time  after, 
Major  R.  did  everything  possible  to  find  out  something  about 
that  Indian.  "I  could  learn  nothing,"  said  the  Major,  "but 
that  Ute  was  a  better  Christian  than  I." 

That  same  night,  it  was  the  last  time  I  saw  him — he  also 
told  me  the  story  of  his  wounding  in  the  Civil  War.  "I  don't 
think  that  in  all  the  army  of  the  Potomac  another  man  was 
wounded  in  the  same  way  I  was.  It  was  at  Fredericksburg. 
You  remember  we  were  thrown  back  across  the  river,  the 
Confederates  pressing  after  us  in  some  places  right  up  to  the 
bank.  In  the  confusion  some  units  of  my  regiment  were  left 
on  the  farther  side.  There  they  held  on,  sheltered  by  the  steep- 
ness of  the  slope,  and  had  not  surrendered.  At  dark  I  was 
ordered  to  take  a  detail  and  drag  a  boat  down  our  side  and 
fetch  them  over.  I  had  the  bow,  the  rest  of  my  men  were 
hanging  on  to  the  sides.  The  boat  was  heavy,  and  as  we  were 
getting  it  down  our  side  an  enemy's  picket  on  the  far  side  saw 
what  we  were  doing  and  fired  a  volley  into  us.  The  men  hold- 
ing back  the  boat  let  her  go,  and  as  it  slipped  from  the  holding, 
it  knocked  me  down  and  ran  over  me,  crushing  me  severely. 
My  ribs  were  broken  and  wrenched,  and  I  was  invalided  for  a 
year.  It  was  a  mean  sort  of  wound;  there  was  no  glory  in  it. 
I  don't  think  there  was  another  man  in  the  whole  army  wounded 
just  as  I  was." 

Some  years  after  that  night,  at  the  headquarters  of  the  5th, 
I  was  invited  by  a  friend  of  mine,  Lanman  Bull  (the  President 
of  the  New  York  Stock  Exchange)  to  go  with  him  into  the 
Adirondacks  for  a  few  days'  trout  fishing,  after  Easter.  When 
we  left  the  railroad  there  was  a  long  thirty-six-mile  drive  to  his 
camp.  A  wagon  from  his  place  met  us.  His  overseer  drove  it. 
We  put  our  traps  on  board,  and  Bull  said  to  me,  " Captain is 


456  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

an  interesting  man,  for  he  was  all  through  the  war.  You  know 
something  about  the  war.  Get  on  the  seat  beside  him,  and  get 
him  yarning.     It  will  pass  the  time." 

Some  of  the  friends  of  my  boyhood,  for  the  pure  (or  impure 
rather)  love  of  scrapping,  had  volunteered  into  the  Confederate 
army.  I  had  read  most  of  the  histories  of  that  struggle,  and 
in  1869  had  gone  over  all  the  battlefields  in  the  Eastern  and 
some  of  those  in  the  Western  campaigns.  My  companion 
proved  to  be  all  that  my  host  said  he  was — a  most  interesting 
story  teller. 

"Were  you  ever  wounded?"  said  I. 

"Yes,"  said  he,  "and  I  don't  think  that  another  man  in  the 
army  was  wounded  in  the  same  way  I  was." 

"Tell  me." 

"  It  was  at  the  battle  of  Fredericksburg!  My  lieutenant  was 
ordered  to  take  a  boat,  etc.,  etc." 

"Do  you  remember  his  name?" 

"I  can't.  I  have  tried.  It  was  an  uncommon  sort  of 
name." 

"Was  it  Romanes?"     He  nearly  fell  off  the  seat. 

"That  was  the  name,"  he  said. 

I  had  the  great  pleasure  of  putting  the  two  men  in  touch  with 
each  other. 

I  am  glad  the  wilderness  was  not  tamed  in  my  time.  Glad 
of  the  long  days  of  earned  rest  I  have  had  within  it  under  the 
sky  and  the  rain.  Glad  of  the  men  I  met,  in  wild  places  and  in 
lawless  days.  Bad  men  undoubtedly  some  of  them  were,  ready 
with  knife  and  pistol,  given  sometimes  to  drinking  vile  whiskey; 
but  all  of  them  brave,  and  very  few  of  them  mean.  One  of 
them,  Carpenter  Jackson,  was  a  man  who  bore  a  name  for 
desperate  courage  wherever  mountain  men  met.  He  had  lived 
many  years  at  that  famous  outlaw  retreat  of  long  ago,  Jack- 
son's Hole — at  the  foot  of  the  Tetons.  I  won  his  confidence. 
I  found  him  the  best  guide  and  all-round  mountain  man, 
excepting  poor  Frank,  I  had  ever  known.  His  father  and 
mother  had  perished  in  an  Indian  attack  on  a  baggage  train. 
He  had  been  saved  by  a  band  of  outlaws,  whose  doings  ended 
in  bringing  down  on  them  not  only  the  law  forces  of  the  Terri- 
tory— these  they  defied — but  finally  the  United  States  Cavalry. 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  457 

The  band  was  broken  up;  many  of  them  killed.  Jackson  was 
cornered  in  a  canon,  and  with  an  empty  rifle  held  up  those 
who  attacked  him,  till,  in  the  dark,  he  slipped  away.  Carpenter 
Jackson  never  boasted  of  his  own  deeds,  so  I  learned  this  part  of 
his  story  from  others,  not  from  him. 

The  outlaws  had  saved  him.  He  lived  with  them  for  many 
years.  Circumstances  almost  forced  him  into  acceptance  of 
their  code,  and  he  had  so  bad  a  name  that,  when  I  engaged  him 
(in  my  usual  reckless  way),  to  be  a  guide  to  my  sons,  who  were 
with  me  in  the  mountains  at  the  time,  the  other  three  men  I 
had  hired  refused  point-blank  to  come  along.  Finally,  I  per- 
suaded them,  and  we  had  a  good  time,  all  of  us  together.  Of 
course,  C.  J.  was  worth  the  rest  of  the  outfit. 

I  camped  alone  with  him  for  several  days  and  nights,  and  he 
told  me  much  of  his  life's  story.  He  said  that  one  good  woman, 
a  half-breed  Indian,  had  made  him  a  good  man.  It  was  no 
boast. 

One  year  after  I  bade  him  good-bye  C.  J.  did  one  of  the  most 
desperately  brave  and  self-sacrificing  things  recorded  even  in 
those  regions  where  courage  and  endurance  are  common  virtues. 
He  was  in  the  mountains  making  his  hunt  for  winter  meat 
when  he  happened  on  a  sergeant  and  a  trooper  from  Fort 
Washakia,  who  also  were  hunting  elk — or  rather  he  happened 
on  their  camp  as  a  sudden  blizzard  burst.  As  night  drew  on 
the  trooper  got  in,  but  the  sergeant  failed  to  make  camp.  In 
the  blinding  storm  C.  J.  went  out  alone  to  look  for  him.  That 
night  and  all  next  day  he  searched,  and  at  night  of  the  following 
day  found  him  with  both  feet  frozen.  He  tied  him  on  his 
own  horse  (the  sergeant  had  lost  his)  and  got  him  back  to 
camp. 

The  cold  was  intense,  so  that,  do  what  they  would,  they 
could  not  thaw  out  the  frozen  feet.  So  again  that  night,  C. 
J.  tied  the  poor  fellow  on  his  horse,  and  started  alone  with  him 
for  the  post.  He  got  there  the  evening  of  the  second  day,  his 
own  fourth  day  without  rest,  and  just  managed  to  save  the 
sergeant's  life,  but  not  his  feet.  Four  days  without  rest  or 
sleep,  two  of  them  in  blinding  storm,  two  in  heavy,  clogging 
snow.  C.  J.  was  old  for  a  mountain  man  (over  fifty)  when  he 
performed  this  extraordinary  feat  of  courageous  endurance. 

The  sergeant's  comrades  made  a  collection  for  Jackson.    Of 


458  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

course  he  would  not  touch  it,  but  passed  it  on  to  the  crippled 
man. 

Jackson  rested  for  a  couple  of  days,  and  then  prepared  to 
go  back  to  the  Indian  reservation  where  his  wife  and  children 
lived.  Then  something  unprecedented  happened  to  the  man 
whom  my  men  refused  to  camp  with;  who  was  so  notorious  an 
outlaw  that  I  was  held  crazy  to  trust  myself  and  my  sons  in  his 
company. 

This  happened:  an  honour  guard  of  the  United  States  Army 
was  ordered  out  by  the  Commandant  at  Fort  Washakia  to 
salute  that  once  outlaw,  a  poor  squaw-man,  as  he  rode  out  of 
the  Post. 

"Once  a  preacher  always  a  preacher,"  is,  I  fear,  true  in  my 
case.  Though  I  am  holiday-making,  I  cannot  help  scrambling 
into  an  extemporized  pulpit  and  preaching  a  short  sermon. 
Remember  I  have  not  been  preaching  for  a  long  time,  and 
though  it  has  been  said  before,  the  hurrying,  driving  days  we 
are  living  in  makes  it  worth  while  to  say  it  again.  Rejoice  with 
your  children.  Make  much  of  those  early  golden  days,  gone 
ere  you  know  it.  Take  holidays;  make  holidays;  and  spend 
them  together.  Too  often  I  noticed  in  city  life,  as  boys  grew 
to  manhood,  fathers  and  sons  had  less  and  less  in  common. 
Many  fathers  acknowledged  this  and  deplored  it  to  me.  Some- 
times the  results  were  apparent;  but  even  when  no  harm 
seemed  done  a  good  thing  was  lost  that  should  not  have  been 
lost. 

The  years  between  twelve  and  twenty  are  years  when  no 
one  thing  in  any  father's  life  is  so  vitally  important  as  that  he 
should  know  his  children,  and  the  boys  should  prefer  the 
company  of  their  father  to  that  of  any  one  else  in  the  world — 
their  mother  excepted.  If  habits  of  mutual  confidence  are  not 
formed  then,  they  seldom  are  ever  formed. 

While  we  have  time,  let  us  cultivate  our  children.  They 
are  our  first  responsibility  and  our  last  delight.  Perhaps 
our  only  immortality.  In  few  of  the  families  to  whose  intimacy 
I  have  been  admitted  did  it  seem  to  me  that  the  boys  were  as 
close  to,  as  understood  by,  their  fathers  as  they  might  have 
been.  I  do  not  say  this  of  careless  or  irreligious  people  only. 
It  was  too  generally  true  of  that  class  of  business  and  pro- 
fessional men,  the  clergy  by  no  means  excepted,  who  had  won 


HOLIDAYS  AND  "SUNLIGHT"  459 

success.  Yet  as  years  weigh  one  down,  what  reward  has  even 
a  kindly  world  to  give  compared  to  the  sympathy  and  under- 
standing of  your  own  child? 

These  things  I  turned  over  in  my  mind;  and  warned  by 
common  parental  failures  round  me,  I  made  a  plan  for  my  own 
future  holidays.  This  plan  I  proposed  to  my  wife,  and  it  won 
her  unselfish  approval.  When  each  of  my  sons  was  thirteen 
years  old  I  would  take  him  away  from  her  for  weeks  into  the 
wild,  and  half  of  the  summer  holidays  we  would  spend  there 
together. 

And  so  it  fell  out  that  from  1892  to  1904  my  sons  were  my 
companions.  In  Maine,  New  Brunswick,  Nova  Scotia,  Quebec, 
I  sought  out  the  best  woodsmen  and  guides  that  could  be  had, 
and  a  very  fine  set  of  men  they  were.  When  we  had  together 
explored  these  near-by  wild  lands,  I  went  back  into  those 
mountains  I  knew  and  loved,  and  together  we  camped  and 
hunted  the  Rockies,  from  the  Canadian  border  to  the  Union 
Pacific  Railroad  line. 

These  trips  cost  money,  sometimes  more  than  I  could  well 
afford.  Especially  was  this  true  of  our  long  journeys,  all  four 
of  us  together,  while  my  sons  were  at  Harvard.  But  no  money 
was  ever  better  spent.     I  thought  so  then.     I  think  so  now. 

I  gave  my  sons  a  taste  for  the  wild.  It  is  a  purifying  taste. 
I  taught  them  to  camp,  to  fish,  to  shoot.  In  staying  power  and 
in  woodcraft  two  of  them  certainly  learned  to  better  their 
father.  The  only  thing  that  saved  my  pride  was  that  none  of 
them  shot  so  well. 

And  so,  looking  back  on  it  all  now,  I  am  deeply  thankful 
for  those  halcyon  days  of  youth  we  spent  together,  my  boys 
and  I.  I  owe  them  much,  for  their  company  kept  me  young.  I 
feel  that  I  am  privileged  in  sharing  with  them  memories  that 
the  years,  as  they  come  and  go,  will  make  not  less  but  more 
delightful. 

Now  I  must  fold  my  tent  and  hie  me  back  to  the  great  city. 
But  perhaps  I  can  persuade  you,  dear  reader,  before  I  quite 
finish  writing,  once  again  to  go  forth  among  the  beautiful 
wild  places,  with  an  older  if  not  a  wiser  lover  of  camp-fire  and 
gun. 


CHAPTER  XXX 

Memories,  and  Good-Bye 

0,  beautiful  is  love,  and  to  be  free 

Is  beautiful,  and  beautiful  are  friends, 
Love,  freedom,  comrades,  surely  make  amends 

For  all  these  thorns  through  which  we  walk  to  death. 
God,  let  us  breathe  your  beauty,  with  our  breath. 

— John  Masefield. 

This  last  chapter  must  differ  from  any  that  have  preceded 
it.  In  it  I  try  to  find  space  for  some  record  of  things  I  cannot 
quite  leave  out,  incidents  I  think  worth  recording.  I  can  give 
them  only  in  outline,  and  the  dates  of  their  happenings  are  wide 
apart.     So  it  must  be  a  scrappy  chapter,  I  fear. 

And  first,  as  to  how  this  autobiography  has  been  put  together. 
It  is  my  own  work  entirely.  I  have  sought  advice  from  no  one. 
I  have  showed  nothing  but  the  first  chapter  to  any  one,  and 
that  to  but  a  few  friends,  before  the  manuscript  was  accepted  by 
the  publisher.  I  am  therefore  responsible,  and  I  alone,  for  any 
mistakes  that  it  may  contain.  I  had  planned  to  write  at  greater 
length  of  the  out-of-doors  side  of  my  life.  It  has  meant  a  great 
deal  to  me — of  my  interesting  journey  through  the  Indian 
country  in  the  '6o's,  and  forty  years  later  of  my  stay  in  equa- 
torial Africa.  But  if  my  book  is  to  reach  the  hands  I  want 
it  in,  it  must  not  be  too  expensive,  and  I  cannot  find  space 
for  an  account  of  these  adventurous  days.  I  have  devoted 
most  mornings  for  five  years  to  writing  and  re-writing  it, 
and  for  the  last  half  year  I  have  closed  my  study  door  on  all 
comers  for  several  hours  daily.  Ever  since  my  return  from 
Africa,  I  have  spent  all  my  leisure  sorting  and  annotating  a 
large  mass  of  correspondence,  and  my  notebooks,  kept  since 
1873,  when  I  began  my  clerical  life  as  curate  of  St.  Giles', 
Norwich,  England.  I  had  a  mass  of  material  to  choose  from. 
I  formed  the  habit  of  making  daily  notes  of  occurrences,  of 

460 


MEMORIES,  AND  GOOD-BYE  461 

things  I  heard,  or  saw,  or  said;  usually  I  made  them  the  night 
of  the  same  day.  I  kept  important  letters,  and  after  1886,  I 
had  the  invaluable  assistance  of  my  dear  friend  and  admirable 
secretary,  John  Reichert. 

These  things  being  so,  my  field  of  choice  was  embarrassingly 
wide  when  I  searched  for  material  for  this  book. 

For  two  years  before  and  for  some  months  after  my  resig- 
nation from  St.  George's,  in  1906,  I  was  in  no  condition  to 
write  anything  .  I  did  not  have  much  of  a  grip  on  life  or  on 
myself.  Do  what  I  would,  I  could  not  sleep.  What  helped  me 
most,  I  think,  in  those  days  was  that  I  never  under  any  cir- 
cumstances touched  any  form  of  sedative. 

I  spent  six  months  quite  alone  in  Africa,  moving  quietly 
about  in  a  beautiful  and  accessible  country,  and  with  no  com- 
panions but  my  black  porters  and  one  unusually  good  and 
capable  missionary-trained  boy,  who  spoke  English  and  several 
native  dialects:  John  Connop.  (A  famous  name,  his,  in  that 
little  known  land,  for  his  father,  with  great  and  faithful  courage, 
had  brought  from  the  far  interior  to  the  coast  the  body  of  his 
loved  master,  Livingston.) 

Marching  till  I  was  tired  every  day;  caring  for  the  hurts 
and  needs  of  seventy-five  native  porters;  seeing  no  one,  and 
receiving  letters  and  newspapers  but  rarely,  I  partly  got  back 
my  powers  of  sleep. 

When  I  had  finished  my  first  African  journey,  my  wife  met 
me  in  England,  and  we  rented  a  tiny  cottage  on  the  slopes  of 
the  Grampians,  in  Scotland,  where  we  spent  many  happy, 
peaceful  days. 

I  fully  expected,  during  all  this  time  that  I  remained  abroad, 
to  take  up  again  clerical  work  of  some  sort,  under  the  direc- 
tion of  my  friend,  Bishop  Greer.  This  was  his  promise  to 
me.  So  much  was  distinctly  understood  between  us.  When 
I  was  disappointed  in  this,  I  determined  to  write  this  story, 
and  began  the  long  business  of  going  over  my  material  and 
sorting  out  from  the  mass  of  it  what  seemed  of  interest  and  of 
value. 

I  have  found  great  pleasure  in  the  work.  It  has  renewed 
for  me  what  is  best  worth  in  the  past.  Dear  faces  of  those 
who  are  gone  have  looked  in  on  me;  and  I  have  not  felt  the 
loneliness  that  so  often  is  the  complaint  of  people  no  longer 


462  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

young.  While  I  and  they  worked  together,  I  thought  that 
what  we  were  doing  or  trying  to  do  was  worth  while.  I  am 
still  surer  of  it  as  I  renew  a  poor  memory  in  the  perusal  of  its 
record. 

After  1 901,  I  began  to  be  a  tired  man.  In  earlier  days  I 
came  back  to  work  with  joy  as  soon  as  my  holidays  were  over. 
I  laid  aside  my  hunting  gear  without  a  sigh.  After  1901,  I  felt 
a  difference.  I  did  not  have  the  spring  of  life  within  that,  for 
so  long,  I  had  rejoiced  in.  I  loved  my  preaching.  I  could 
hold  my  audiences.  But  speaking  began  to  tire  me  dreadfully, 
and  if  I  spoke  in  the  evening,  it  was  often  hard  to  sleep  after- 
ward. I  was  forced  to  admit  to  myself  that  I  must  modify 
seriously  my  plans.  I  must  secure  assistance  of  a  sort  that  till 
then  I  had  of  purpose  foregone. 

I  had  planned  to  help  my  people;  more  than  that,  in  a  small 
way  I  had  planned  to  help  the  church  by  showing  that  a  large 
parish  could  accomplish  something  in  educating  the  younger 
clergy:  supplementing  the  worse  than  inadequate  preparation 
the  seminaries  provided;  and  my  plans  had  not  been  quite  a 
failure.  Now  I  could  no  longer  hide  from  myself  the  fact  that 
I  myself  needed  help  in  carrying  a  load  that  had  grown  beyond 
my  strength. 

And  this  meant  a  change  in  my  relation  to  St.  George's; 
meant  taking  a  step  that  I  found  very  hard  to  take.  I  went  to 
my  faithful  friend  and  senior  warden,  and  opened  to  him  my 
heart.  "I  want,"  said  I,  "a  senior  assistant.  One  not  under 
me  but  beside  me.  One  who  can  gradually  step  into  my  place. 
I  find  I  cannot  much  longer  'carry  on'  alone." 

Mr.  Morgan's  response  to  this  was  like  himself.  He  assured 
me  of  his  full  support,  and  more  than  that  (and  I  want  to  em- 
phasize this),  he  gave  me  no  hint  even  of  wishing  to  have  one 
word  to  say  in  the  momentous  matter  of  the  choice  of  a  senior 
assistant.  As  my  senior  warden  he  would  have  been  well 
within  his  rights  had  he  suggested  to  me  that  such  a  man  as  I 
proposed  to  look  for  would  naturally  fill  the  place  of  assistant 
rector,  and  in  his  choice  the  vestry  had  properly  as  much  if  not 
more  to  say  than  I  had;  I  went  to  him,  recognizing  this  right. 
I  was  willing  to  act  on  any  suggestion  as  to  conference  he 
might  make.  But  in  his  own  great  generous-hearted  spirit  of 
confidence,  which  he  always  showed  me,  he  made  no  suggestion 


MEMORIES,  AND  GOOD-BYE  463 

in  that  direction  at  all.  He  was  deeply  moved  by  what  I  had 
told  about  my  feeling  of  incapacity.  "Rector,"  he  said,  "you 
know  what  you  want.  You  know  what  St.  George's  wants. 
Think  it  over.  Look  round,  find  your  man,  and  I  will  guar- 
antee if  necessary  a  liberal  salary."  No  wonder  I  had  suc- 
ceeded in  some  difficult  things  when  I  had  that  sort  of  backing! 

A  week  later,  after  breakfast  at  219  Madison  Avenue,  I  said: 
"I  have  thought  it  over.  I  think  I  have  found  the  man,  and  I 
have  reason  to  believe  that  he  will  favourably  consider  a  call, 
but  I  am  afraid  you  will  be  scared  by  my  suggestion.  If  you 
do  not  approve  of  my  choice,  tell  me  so.  You  have  a  perfect 
right  to  disapprove,  and  I  will  not  try  to  over-persuade  you. 
I  think  Charles  H.  Brent,  of  the  Society  of  St.  John  the  Evan- 
gelist (otherwise  known  as  the  Cowley  Fathers),  of  Boston, 
is  the  best  man  for  the  place.  He  is,  of  course,  a  High  Church- 
man, but  he  is  not  as  high  as  he  was  when  he  sought  'the  order.' 
He  is  a  man  of  God.  He  is  in  sympathy  with  the  present  time. 
His  eyes  are  in  the  front  of  his  head,  and  not  in  the  back.  He 
can  preach.  He  loves  men  and  understands  them,  and  he  is  a 
democrat." 

Sure  enough,  as  I  named  Brent  my  warden  sat  up.  But  I 
went  on  quietly  with  my  brief  statement  of  his  fitness  for  our 
work.  After  a  short  silence,  he  said:  "Yes,  he  is  a  good  man, 
and  a  strong  man.     Would  he  consider  it?" 

I  said  I  had  reason  to  think  he  would. 

"Then,"  said  my  dear  friend,  "go  ahead,  Rector.  I  will 
back  you.  I'll  be  responsible  for  his  salary."  (And  without 
one  word  from  me  named  an  ample  sum.) 

In  the  next  few  days  the  missionary  bishopric  of  the  Philip- 
pines was  offered  Mr.  Brent,  which  of  course  he  regarded  as  a 
first  call. 

If  I  failed  as  I  did  to  find  the  help  I  needed,  I  had  the  satis- 
faction of  knowing  that,  as  the  Bishop  of  the  Philippines  made 
his  mark  in  the  land,  my  dear  warden  did  not  think  any  the  less 
of  the  wisdom  of  my  choice  in  suggesting  his  name  as  that  of 
one  eminently  fitted  to  step  into  my  place  as  rector,  and  carry 
forward  the  work  in  the  old  church,  the  success  of  which  always 
lay  so  near  his  heart. 

I  must  now  tell  of  one  very  unexpected  and  delightful  thing, 
a  visit  from  my  father.     He  had  been  invited  to  attend  the 


464  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

Northfield  Conference,  where  his  friend  Mr.  Moody  still 
gathered  the  evangelical  revivalists  together.  Father  ac- 
cepted, for  he  and  Moody  were  close  friends,  and  had  worked 
together  for  years  on  the  other  side.  Father  was  by  then  an 
old  man.  He  rarely  left  London.  A  visit  to  the  north  of 
Scotland  was  as  far  as  he  got  from  home.  Of  the  social  and 
religious  conditions  on  this  side  he  knew  nothing  at  all,  and 
I  do  not  think  he  had  a  very  high  opinion  in  general  of  things 
un-English. 

Of  my  heresies,  my  wide  strayings  from  the  old  ways  in  which 
he  still  resolutely  trod,  he  had  heard  from  many  quarters.  I 
planned  to  give  Father  the  time  of  his  life,  and  a  reception 
he  would  not  forget.  I  took  Mr.  Morgan  into  my  confidence, 
and  he  was  immensely  pleased  with  the  idea.  "You  make 
him  preach  in  the  morning,  and  I'll  send  the  Corsair  down  the 
bay,  and  we'll  take  him  off  at  Quarantine."  (I  am  afraid 
there  was  something  of  a  pull  necessary  here.) 

Everything  worked  splendidly.  In  fine  weather  the  liner 
came  up  the  bay,  and  the  Commodore's  yacht  came  alongside. 
And,  for  the  first  time  in  his  simple,  unassuming  life,  Father 
had  done  him,  in  a  foreign  harbour,  far  from  home,  distin- 
guished honour. 

No  real  preacher,  as  was  my  father,  could  fail  to  be  moved 
by  the  splendid  congregation  and  inspiring  service  at  St. 
George's  on  Sunday  morning.  I  had  the  hymns  I  knew  he 
loved  sung  by  such  a  choir  and  such  a  congregation  as  he  had 
never  seen  assembled  before  in  an  Episcopal  church,  and  when 
it  was  over,  and  my  people  crowded  round  him  to  welcome  him 
after  his  sermon,  Father  was  quite  overcome. 

After  that  visit  he  believed  and  rejoiced  in  the  work  we  had 
done;  and  my  people  would,  when  they  visited  London,  go  on 
Sundays  to  the  old  shabby  chapel,  St.  John's,  Halkin  Street, 
and  give  him  greetings  from  St.  George's.  Of  such  visits  he 
used  to  write  me  with  evident  delight. 

The  chapel  he  preached  in  for  almost  forty  years  has  been 
pulled  down  long  ago.  It  was  unsightly  enough,  but  in  its 
day  it,  and  many  more  like  it  in  England  and  Ireland  and  Wales, 
did  a  lasting  and  a  good  work.  From  those  chapels  went  forth 
the  only  protest  then  made  against  that  deadening  materialism 
that  threatened  the  life  of  English  Christianity.     And  more, 


MEMORIES,  AND  GOOD-BYE  465 

what  was  best  in  that  old  Evangelical  message  lives  and  works 
still. 

The  best  leaders,  the  most  trusted,  in  the  Labour  movement, 
the  men  of  courage  and  character  and  vision,  who  to-day  in  the 
old  land  are  her  best  bulwark  against  revolution:  men  of  the 
stamp  of  Robert  Smillie  and  Henderson  and  Thomas — these 
men  are  what  they  are  because  they  went  to  Sunday  School  in 
those  old  dingy  chapels,  and  have  not  forgotten  the  lessons  of 
Christian  democracy  they  learned  in  them. 

One  of  the  fascinations  of  the  clerical  life  is  the  opportunities 
it  gives  for  insight  into  the  strange  and  often  surprisingly  beau- 
tiful inner  chambers  of  our  human  nature.  As  I  turn  back 
the  leaves  of  old  notebooks,  I  find  story  after  story  that  is 
worth  the  telling.  By  way  of  illustration,  I  will  here  copy  the 
record  of  parish  happenings  I  find  recorded  in  a  single  week,  in 
December,  1898.  I  have  been  asked  where  I  got  my  sermons 
from.     Here  is  my  answer,  in  part,  at  least. 

A  lady  of  my  congregation,  whose  charge  was  a  class  of 
boys  in  the  Sunday  School,  was  paying  an  evening  visit  to  the 
home  of  one  of  them,  in  a  tenement  house.  When  she  called, 
the  lad  was  out.  While  waiting  for  him,  his  sister,  whom  she 
did  not  know,  came  in.  At  first  glance  the  girl's  appearance 
did  not  seem  very  promising.  She  was  rather  showily  dressed 
in  a  fur  collar  and  blue-satin  waist.  The  visitor  noticed  that 
though  it  was  past  six  o'clock,  the  girl  made  no  move  to  take 
off  her  out-of-doors  dress.  Conversation  began.  Where  did 
she  work? — She  was  a  saleslady  in  a  high-class  store. — Was 
she  not  through  with  her  work  for  the  day? — yes,  she  was,  but 
she  had  to  go  out  again. 

Here  her  mother  chimed  in.  "She  ought  to  be  done  with 
her  work."  The  visitor  did  not  understand,  and  the  girl  said 
nothing,  so  her  mother  went  on  with  the  story.  Her  daughter 
had  a  girl  friend  who  lived  in  Harlem,  and  who  worked  in  a 
downtown  store  that  was  open  till  ten.  Her  daughter  did  not 
want  her  friend  to  take  the  long  trip  home  after  ten  at  night, 
and  so  she  had  made  an  arrangement  to  take,  herself,  her  place, 
from  seven  to  ten  during  the  rush  season. 

I  got  on  with  boys.  I  always  pushed  aside  other  arrange- 
ments, when  I  could,  to  talk  to  a  school  or  visit  a  college,  male 
or  female. 


A66  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

J.  P.  Morgan,  Jr.,  came  camping  with  me  for  three  consecu- 
tive years,  when  first  I  took  St.  George's,  and  when  he  went  to 
Harvard,  he  asked  me  to  visit  him  and  meet  his  friends.  In 
much  the  same  way  I  came  to  know  several  universities  from 
the  inside,  not  merely  as  a  visiting  preacher.  Indeed,  I  told 
hunting  stories  as  well  as  preached  when  I  could.  So  boys 
came  to  see  me  a  good  deal  in  their  own  shy  way.  Sometimes 
they  came  to  me  when  they  were  in  trouble. 

I  knew  the  son  of  very  rich  and  fashionable  parents.  When 
he  went  to  college  he  fell  into  bad,  fast  company.  At  the  out- 
set, he  had  a  revulsion,  as  many  lads  have,  and  went  straight 
to  his  father  and  told  him  all.  His  father  said,  "Oh,  I  expected 
that,  Jack.  I  always  went  with  women  when  I  was  young.  All 
men  do.  Only  keep  away  from  actresses,  for  one  of  them  may 
try  to  marry  you."  This  in  the  afternoon.  The  boy  had  to  go 
back  to  college  that  night,  but  before  doing  so,  he  went  to  his 
mother.  He  did  not  feel  at  ease.  He  wanted  a  heart-to-heart 
talk  with  his  mother,  since  his  father's  acceptance  of  the  situa- 
tion did  not  satisfy  him,  and  the  boy  waited  till  strangers  had 
gone,  and  he  could  see  his  mother  alone.  When  he  saw  her, 
she  was  too  drunk  to  talk  sensibly  to  him.  So  far  as  I  know, 
that  lad  never  amounted  to  much.  He  surely  was  in  hard 
luck.  He  was  full  of  remorse  and  good  resolution  at  the 
time. 

This  next  story  seems  scarcely  believable,  but  the  father  told 
it  to  me  himself.  Mr.  A.,  a  noted  New  York  lawyer,  sent  his 
boy  to  a  good  boarding  school  that  I  knew  well.  I  should  say 
that  Mr.  A.  was  not  a  member  of  my  congregation,  but  I  had 
frequently  met  him  socially,  and  he  came  to  me  to  ask  my  ad- 
vice. The  boy  at  first  took  no  interest  in  his  lessons,  nor  did 
school  sports  appeal  to  him.  During  the  second  term  a  change 
set  in,  and  the  lad  began  to  come  to  life.  At  the  end  of  his 
second  year,  the  school  had  such  a  hold  of  him  that  during  the 
summer  holidays  he  counted  the  days  till  he  could  go  back. 
After  one  more  term,  Mr.  A.  took  his  boy  away  from  that 
school,  his  reason  being — I  quote  his  own  words:  "He  enjoys 
the  school  too  much,  and  enjoyment  in  a  lad  is  destructive  of 
any  true  progress."  That  poor,  outraged  lad  never  took  any 
interest  again  in  anything,  and  he  died  three  years  afterward. 
It  may  sound  unbelievable,  but  Mr.  A.  was  a  man  of  weight 


MEMORIES,  AND  GOOD-BYE  467 

and  of  character,  and  the  head  of  a  large  and  prosperous  legal 
firm. 

We  did  not  look  on  the  New  York  Speedway,  or  on  the 
drivers  of  fast  trotters,  racing  home  on  Sunday  afternoons,  as 
specially  likely  to  provide  us  with  evidence  of  Christian  living. 
Yet  on  that  speedway,  in  this  same  week  in  December,  there 
was  a  thing  done  by  a  sporting  man  named  McDonald  that 
would  have  made  a  text  for  a  sermon,  and  I  took  it.  McDon- 
ald deliberately  threw  his  runaway  horse  to  save  his  dashing 
into  four  people  jogging  homeward  in  a  buggy.  He  killed  his 
horse,  and  was  instantly  killed  himself — died  that  others, 
unknown  to  him,  might  live — followed  a  greater  example, 
perhaps,  than  he  knew. 

One  swallow  does  not  make  a  summer,  or  one  act  a  Chris- 
tian; but  there  is  some  of  God  in  every  man,  and  a  great  deal  of 
God  in  many  men  who  are  ignorant  of  the  fact. 

A  parish  happening,  and  an  amusing  one,  I  will  tell  of  here. 

It  takes  me  back  to  earlier  years,  but  is  worth  entry.     Mrs. 

was  one  of  the  first  rich  people  who  joined  St.  George's. 
Her  husband  did  not  come  to  church;  she  came  regularly — she 
and  two  sons,  the  eldest  a  rascal;  the  younger,  her  darling,  a 
wild  but  not  an  altogether  bad  boy.  Her  husband's  confidence 
in  his  son's  character  was  shown  in  his  will.  He  named  his 
wife  as  his  sole  legatee,  leaving  the  disposition  of  his  comfort- 
able estate  entirely  to  her.     He  suddenly  died;  and  when,  but 

a  few  weeks  after  his  death,  Mrs. 's  younger  son  also  died 

suddenly,  the  poor  old  lady  suffered  utter  collapse.  Tempo- 
rarily she  was  totally  incapable  of  attending  to  the  business 
thrust  on  her,  or  indeed  of  attending  to  anything. 

I  visited  her  almost  daily  for  a  week,  and  did  what  I  could 
to  calm  and  steady  her  poor  shaken  mind.  Calling  early  one 
morning,  I  was  met  at  the  door  by  the  old  manservant,  who 
had  served  the  family  for  many  years  and  who  knew  me  well. 
He  was  white  and  trembling.  I  noticed  a  large  covered  carriage 
that  stood  at  the  door.     As  he  opened  the  door  for  me,  he  said, 

in  a  whisper:  "Doctor,  they  are  taking  Mrs. to  an  asylum. 

She  cannot  stand  it."  As  I  passed  from  the  door,  I  was  met  in 
the  hall  by  the  doctor,  at  that  time  a  very  famous  alienist, 
whom  I  knew  slightly.  He  said:  "I  am  sorry  to  say,  Doctor 
Rainsford,  that  I  find  I  must  take  Mrs. to  my  sanitarium. 


468  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

She  is  quite  incapable  at  present  of  looking  after  herself." 

As  the  doctor  said  this,  I  noticed  that  Mrs. 's  eldest  son 

was  in  the  drawing  room  standing  behind  him. 

I  looked  the  doctor  full  in  the  eye  and  said:  "Dr. , 

Mrs.  is  naturally  utterly  broken  down  by  this  sudden 

calamity,  but  if  you  take  her  away  from  her  home,  away  from 
her  old  servants  and  the  surroundings  she  is  accustomed  to,  you 
will  increasingly  unsettle  and  depress  her.  She  is  no  subject 
for  your  private  sanitarium.     She  will  do  better  where  she  is." 

Said  the  doctor:  "That,  sir,  is  a  question  for  me  to  settle,  not 
for  you."  I  did  not  answer  him  at  once,  but  turning  to  the 
old  butler  said  out  loud:  "Don't  wait  to  put  on  your  hat,  but 
go  just  as  fast  as  you  can  to  242  East  15th  Street,  and  ask 

Mrs.  Jay  to  come  to  Mrs.  at  once.     Say  that  Doctor 

Rainsford  sent  you,  and  that  he  is  waiting  for  her  at  this  house." 

The  old  man  dived  down  the  steps  and  was  gone.  I  then 
turned  to  face  an  angry  alienist. 

"Do  you  know  what  you  are  doing,  sir?  Do  you  know  the 
responsibility  you  are  taking?" 

"I  do,  sir,  know  just  what  I  am  doing,  and  the  responsibility 

I  am  taking,  and  I  say  that  you  shall  not  take  Mrs. out  of 

her  home  this  morning  to  your  private  asylum.  And  you  will 
find  that  Mrs.  Jay,  who,  as  you  know,  has  considerable  social 
influence  in  New  York,  and  who  has  been  since  girlhood  a  close 

friend  of  Mrs. here,  will  back  up  what  I  have  said.    No,  you 

cannot  take  this  poor  old  distracted  lady  from  her  home." 

He  looked  at  me  for  a  minute,  and  then  he  and  Mrs. 's 

son  went  down  the  stoop  and  into  the  carriage  and  drove  away. 
Presently  Mrs.  Jay  came,  and  she  camped  in  that  house  by  the 

side  of  Mrs. for  some  days.     In  the  kindly  company  of  a 

very  strong  personality,  the  poor  lady  soon  recovered  from  the 
results  of  shock. 

Now  for  the  sequel!    About  a  year   afterward  I   had   a 

letter  from  Mrs. .     It  ran,  "Dear  Dr.  Rainsford — I  find 

that  your  preaching  is  becoming  so  unsettling  that  I  have  de- 
cided to  join  another  church."  Of  course  the  poor  old  soul 
never  had  even  an  inkling  of  what  I  had  saved  her  from.  None 
knew  that  but  Mrs.  Jay. 

The  case  of  Mrs. was  not  the  only  unpleasant  experience 

I  had  with  alienist  doctors.     Some,  like  Dr.  Allan  Starr,  were 


MEMORIES,  AND  GOOD-BYE  469 

a  tower  of  strength  in  time  of  need.  Some  were  most  un- 
reliable. Perhaps  the  alienist  has  not  yet  quite  found  his 
place,  his  balance  in  the  medical  profession.  Some  of  them  are 
too  much  inclined  to  act  as  though,  in  their  treatment  of  their 
patients,  they  were  a  law  unto  themselves,  and  not  bound  to 
guard  strictly  their  patients'  confidence.1  The  peculiar  mental 
disturbance  of  a  patient  who  needs  an  alienist  doctor  may  seem 
to  serve  as  an  excuse  for  such  laxity,  but  I  have  known  cruel 
and  widespread  harm  to  be  done  by  some  who  allowed  them- 
selves to  transgress  the  ancient  and  necessary  obedience  to  the 
universal  medical  rule  of  honour. 

Mr.  Justice  Holmes  says:  "To  act  with  enthusiasm  and  faith 
is  the  condition  of  acting  greatly."  I  cannot  say  I  acted 
greatly.  I  can  say  I  certainly  found  that  in  contact  with  life 
it  was  natural  to  feel  an  enthusiasm  for  its  service.  I  took 
pains  to  meet  and  to  know  people;  not  only  the  attractive  kind 
of  people,  but  all  sorts  of  them.  My  study  door  stood  open  to 
all.  I  even  had  a  visit  from  Mr.  Hearst,  who  asked  me  to  write 
a  signed  article  for  the  American  a  few  days  after  Mr.  Roose- 
velt's scathing  attack  on  him,  when  President  McKinley  was 
shot.  And  by  the  way,  though  I  refused  of  course  to  write, 
he  printed  an  article  of  mine,  the  next  day,  on  the  first  page 
of  the  paper,  my  name  at  the  foot  of  it  in  heavy  type.  Some- 
thing I  had  written  somewhere  was  laid  hold  on  for  his  purpose. 
I  went  to  my  lawyer,  Judge  Howland,  and  asked  what  I  could 
do.     He  said:  "Nothing." 

So,  as  I  say,  my  study  door  stood  open  to  all.  It  was  a 
proceeding  wasteful  of  time,  but  I  found  it  paid.  To-day  I 
notice  it  is  often  hard  for  the  laity  to  reach  the  clergy.  A  new 
clerical  adjunct,  "the  Secretary,"  comes  between.  One  of 
our  reasons  for  loss  of  power,  I  am  persuaded,  lies  here.  The 
clergy  are  not  accessible  enough.  I  have  known  a  man  to  call 
twenty-two  times  on  a  city  rector.  Real  business  he  had,  and 
a  claim  to  be  heard,  and  he  never  succeeded  in  seeing  that 
rector.  It  is  all  wrong!  One  of  the  chief  sources  of  power  of 
the  priesthood  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  is  the  accessi- 
bility of  its  clergy.  The  poorest  parishioner  can  usually  gain 
access  to  his  parish  priest  at  any  hour  of  the  day  or  night. 

Sometimes  I  was  asked,  "How  do  you  gain  the  ear  of  people? 

1  From  the  breaking  of  such  a  rule  I  have  myself  suffered. 


47o  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

How  do  you  get  texts  ?"  I  have  here  turned  but  a  few  leaves  of 
my  life's  daily  notebook.  Here,  surely,  are  subjects  enough 
for  a  month  of  Sundays.  "Give,  and  it  shall  be  given  to  you, 
by  man."  Any  good  teaching  or  preaching  I  did,  I  got  chiefly 
from  the  faces  that  looked  into  mine. 

I  formed  a  habit  as  a  boy  that  I  found  helpful.  I  carried  a 
paper  and  pencil  always,  and  when  faces  or  scenes,  phrases, 
fragments,  pointed  ways  of  stating  things,  anything,  anywhere, 
appealed  to  me,  I  noted  down  there  and  then  my  impressions. 
Sometimes  I  carefully  polished  up  these  fragments  in  my  study, 
I  found  I  could  use  them  as  nails  to  hang  a  picture  on,  or  as 
arrows  that,  though  they  seemed  shot  at  a  venture  as  I  talked, 
had  polished  points  to  them  that  went  home.  When  I  used 
them  in  the  pulpit,  they  may  have  seemed  happy  extempore 
productions,  appealing  to  the  listener  as  quite  spontaneous,  the 
flashings  of  the  moment.  They  were  seldom  anything  of  the 
sort.  In  this  story  of  mine  many  of  these  are  set.  They  rep- 
resent the  poor  best  I  have  to  give.  They  are  in  a  way  to  me 
precious  stones,  not  of  the  first  water,  I  know;  but  again  I  know 
they  are  not  " paste.' ' 

Still  be  patient,  dear  reader,  while  I  say  one  or  two  more 
things  about  the  best  ways  I  know  of  preaching  and  helping. 
You  must  tear  up  red  tape.  You  must  keep  on  tearing  up  red 
tape  if  you  are  to  accomplish  anything,  and  this  applies  to  every 
man's  work.  The  teacher  who  is  positively  hurtful  to  his 
public  is  the  well-meaning,  self-satisfied  acceptor  of  the  status 
quo.  He  bows  before  a  god  of  custom,  not  a  God  of  Truth. 
Reform's  chief  enemy  is  self-complacent  persistence  in  unen- 
lightened custom.  To  get  things  done,  you  must  not  only  at 
times  disregard  it,  but  deliberately  flout  it.  Weak  brethren 
abound.  They  are  sure  to  be  worshippers  of  red  tape.  Do 
not,  I  beg,  pay  too  much  attention  to  them.  Fear  of  offending 
the  weak  brother  is  responsible  for  a  good  deal  of  weak  preach- 
ing, of  compromising  with  Truth. 

The  light  that  shines  through  fog  and  night  sends  its  warn- 
ing, saving  gleam  to  the  uncertain  sailor.  It  fulfils  its  purpose 
in  guiding  him.  But  the  light  that  saves  a  ship  and  crew  plays 
havoc  with  the  gulls.  We  must  be  sorry  for  the  gull's  broken 
wing,  but  surely  we  cannot  on  their  account  close  up  the  light- 
house. 


MEMORIES,  AND  GOOD-BYE  471 

And  now  one  more  story  and  the  last.  In  telling  it  I  keep  a 
promise,  made  by  me  to  one  of  the  nearest  and  dearest  friends 
I  ever  had,  one  whose  loving  trust  never  failed  me  from  the 
first  day  I  knew  him  till  the  night  when  I  bade  him  good-bye. 
It  was  then  he  told  me  this  story  of  his  boyhood,  and  charged 
me:  "When  I  am  gone,  tell  what  I  now  tell  you  to  the  people  of 
St.  George's." 

My  people  were  poor,  and  the  first  job  I  had  was  at  $1.50  a  week,  in  a  bank- 
ing house,  where  my  work  was  to  close  and  open  doors,  clean  the  place,  and 
do  as  I  was  told.  The  head  of  the  firm  took  a  fancy  to  me,  trusted  me,  and 
advanced  me.  And  before  I  was  twenty,  I  had  the  key  of  the  cash  drawer  and 
safe.  I  cannot  even  now  account  for  what  I  did,  but  I  got  into  the  way  of 
taking  small  sums  of  money  from  the  till.  I  had  no  vices.  I  did  not  drink, 
did  not  go  with  women,  did  not  even  smoke.  But  I  did  love  to  give  boys,  not 
so  well  fixed  as  I  was,  a  good  time,  and  this  was  how  the  money  I  took  was 
usually  spent.  The  habit  grew  on  me.  I  took  larger  sums,  and  after  this 
had  gone  on  for  almost  a  year,  I  aroused  myself  one  day,  and  to  my  horror 
found  I  had  stolen  more  than  $i,aoo,  and  that  soon  I  must  be  found  out. 

That  night  I  could  not  sleep.  The  disgrace,  the  ingratitude,  the  cruelty 
to  my  parents,  came  home  to  me,  and  I  almost  went  to  the  river.  Next  morn- 
ing, when  my  friend  and  employer  came  to  business,  I  went  into  his  private 
room.  I  made  no  excuses.  I  told  the  truth:  said  I  was  a  thief;  said  how 
much  I  had  taken,  and  what  I  had  spent  the  money  on.  My  employer 
looked  at  me,  said  nothing,  and  for  a  moment  put  his  head  in  his  hands.  Then, 
still  saying  nothing,  he  took  oat  his  cheque  book,  wrote  a  cheque  for  the  sum 

I  named,  and  said,  "  Soon  as  the  banks  open,  go  to ,  and  cash  this  cheque, 

and  put  the  money  in  the  till." 

Then  he  rose,  put  out  his  hand  and  took  mine,  and  looking  at  me,  said, 
"J ,  trust  your  fellow-men." 

How  any  American  can  be  skeptical  of  the  innate  goodness 
and  firm,  self-sacrificing  courage  of  the  people  of  our  land  as  a 
whole,  after  the  spectacle  that  the  last  great  years  have  given 
to  all  observing  men,  I  cannot  fancy!  If  men,  common  men, 
all  sorts  of  men,  are  not  worth  working  for  and  working  with — 
are  not  worth  trusting — then  the  universe,  so  far  as  we  know 
anything  about  it,  is  an  abortion.  If  God  is  not  resident  in  the 
hearts  of  men  here  and  now,  He  certainly  is  not  hidden  away 
from  us  as  somewhere  beyond  the  stars.  If,  in  the  order  of 
the  world  we  live  in,  He  is  not  observable,  He  is  not  a  God  we 
can  believe  in,  love,  or  obey. 

That  He  was  in  men's  hearts,  that  He  was  observable  and 


472  THE  STORY  OF  A  VARIED  LIFE 

lovable,  that  He  was  revealed  in  things  as  they  are,  Jesus  taught 
if  He  taught  anything.  As  we  look  steadily  at  life,  in  spite  of 
the  sometimes  black  and  pitiless  appearance  of  things,  we  see 
that  Jesus'  faith  in  a  God  resident  in  man  his  child  is  justified. 
Man  has  grown  in  grace.  Love  for  his  fellows,  and  a  deepening 
and  widening  appreciation  of  possibilities  of  good  in  all  men 
do  influence  our  lives,  are  visible  in  our  laws,  as  never  before. 

Let  us  fix  our  minds  and  wills  on  this  great  fact;  grasping  it, 
living  in  its  light,  we,  too,  find  ourselves  touching  the  garment 
hem  of  our  Master,  and  realizing  anew  the  healing  virtue  of  a 
faith  in  Him  who  says:  "One  is  your  father,  even  God,  and  all 
ye  are  brethren." 

That  banker,  when  he  forgave  the  young  thief,  and  took  him 
back  to  his  confidence,  "saved  a  soul  from  death,  and  covered 
a  multitude  of  sins."  He  did  more:  he  saved  for  the  city  a 
great  citizen.  Why  did  he  do  it  ?  Because  he  believed  in,  and 
tried  to  obey,  Jesus.  Perhaps  you  say:  "I  cannot  believe  in 
Jesus;  something,  I  know  not  what,  has  prevented  his  appealing 
to  me."  Many  are  in  that  case  to-day.  Our  orthodoxies  have 
misstated  and  disguised  the  great  Lord  Jesus  Christ.  But  if 
you  cannot  take  Jesus  as  your  Master,  there  are  two  things 
you  can  do. 

First:  believe  in  the  Truth.  Try  to  find  it,  and  when  and  so 
far  as  you  have  found  it,  obey  it. 

And  second:  believe  in  your  fellow-men,  and  try  to  serve 
them. 

Make  obedience  to  these  two  rules  the  main  purpose  of  your 
life,  and  though  you  see  not  Jesus,  you  are  of  His  high  company. 
You  may  deny  Him.  He  will  not  deny  you.  Of  Him,  long 
ago,  it  was  said,  "He  knew  what  was  in  man."  He  still  towers 
above  all  the  great  and  all  the  good  that,  in  all  times  and  in 
all  religions,  have  called  on  their  fellows  to  go  onward  and 
upward.  "He  is  the  chief  among  ten  thousand,  and  the  alto- 
gether lovely." 

At  certain  times  in  my  life  I  have  achieved  a  sense  of  conse- 
cration which  brought  with  it  indifference  to  praise  or  blame,  to 
personal  fortune,  or  to  the  winning  or  losing  of  the  most  cher- 
ished desires  I  knew.  On  that  high  level  I  have  lived  for  a 
time,  and  peace  always,  and  power  sometimes,  were  mine. 
Again,  I  have  slipped  slowly  down,  or  fallen  suddenly  down, 


MEMORIES,  AND  GOOD-BYE  473 

from  that  serene  mountain  land  of  life,  and  found  myself  chin 
deep  in  the  valley  bogs,  struggling  to  keep  my  lips  above  the 
muck. 

Some  seem  to  think  that  once  a  man  has  climbed  to  the  high 
mountain  slopes,  he  can  never  descend,  but  must  ever  breathe 
that  higher  air;  that  slipping  and  falling  are  impossible  to  those 
who  have  so  striven,  and  won.  And  some  others  think  that  no 
poor  trudging  soul  who  wearily  shuffles  along  the  valley  road  to- 
day could  ever  really  have  stood  among  the  high,  sun-bathed 
lands  so  far  above  him,  or  could  ever  win  to  their  heights  again. 

I  think  if  we  were  more  frank  when  we  spoke  of  our  religious 
experiences,  we  would  agree  that  life  in  religion,  as  in  every 
other  department  of  it,  has  been  for  all,  or  almost  all,  a  very 
up-and-down  business — dark  days,  and  much  stumbling,  and 
now  and  then  a  gleam  of  the  light  that  never  was  on  sea  or 
land.  A  smooth  path,  a  steady,  uninterrupted  stride  forward, 
an  unchanging  purpose,  high  and  pure !  Some  few  may  have 
attained  to  it.  To  judge  by  modern  biographies,  one  would 
suppose  it  was  an  affair  of  everyday  occurrence.  But  in  our 
hearts  we  know  it  is  not  so,  and  from  the  expurgated  and  emas- 
culated reports  of  such  lives,  we  turn  away,  uncheered  and  un- 
helped.  Life  is  life,  a  broken  and  imperfect  affair  at  best. 
If,  at  the  end  of  it,  we  are  not  altogether  ashamed  to  show  the 
Master  our  hands,  then  have  we  lived  not  quite  unworthily. 

The  hardest  part  of  life,  as  I  have  experienced  it,  is  not  the 
failures  of  other  people,  but  my  own  failures.  The  failure 
steadily  and  always  to  thread  those  high  levels  which,  at  times, 
I  clearly  have  seen.  My  own  sinnings  have  been  the  most 
disheartening  experiences  I  have  known.  May  God,  in  His 
mercy,  forgive  me! 

One  stone  the  more  swings  to  its  place 

In  that  dread  temple  of  thy  worth — 
It  is  enough  that  through  Thy  grace 

I  saw  naught  common  on  Thy  earth. — 

Take  not  that  vision  from  my  ken 

Oh  what  so  'ere  may  spoil  or  speed — 
Help  me  to  need  no  aid  of  men 

That  I  may  help  such  men  as  need. 


THE  END 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Abroad,  visit,  52 

Acton,  Lord,  333 

Adirondacks,  trout  fishing  in  the,  455 

Agape,  296 

Allen,  Dr.  A.  V.  G.,  167,  194;  quoted, 

359 
Alpine  mishap,  56 
Americanization,  275,  276 
Americans,    idealism,    5,    331 
Amusements,    Presbyterian    view    of, 

in  1837,  27 
Ancestry,  13 

Anglicanism  at  its  worst,  228 
Anti-ism,  332 

Anti-Vice  Society,  New  York,  340 
Arley  on  Lough  Sheelan,  49 
Arnold,   Matthew,   63,    120,    137,    140, 

219 
Author,  birth  and  birthplace  of,  12 
Autobiography,  reasons  for  writing,  I, 

6;  quality  of,  2 
Avenue  A,  New  York  City,  235,  243 

Bacon,  Lord,  on  God,  148 

Bailey,  Lady,  52 

Baltimore,  curious   experience   at,    161 

Barlow,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Peter,  343 

Barnes,  Jim,  318 

Barnes,  William,  395 

Barrett,  Dr.,  136 

Barton,     John,     and     Menai     Straits 

Bridge,    18 
Bays,  Miss,  305 
Belief,  changes  of,  370 
Beliefs,  old,  261 

Bethnal    Green,    sewing   class    at,    70 
Bible,  the,  2;  inerrant,  389 
Biography,  real,  2 
Birth  control,  339-42 
Blackfoot  Indians,  82,  88 
Blake,  Hon.  Edward,  188,  189,  195 
Blumenthal,   58 
Boarding   school,   41 
Book  of  Common  Prayer,  350-1-2 
Booth,  Charles,  "The  Life  and  Labour 

of  the  People  of  London,"  339 
Booth,  General  William,  121 


Bordighera,  picnic  at,  57 

Boston,  grant  to  build,  14;  opinion  on, 
169 

Boyhood  days,  20 

Boys'  Club  (St.  George's),  organiza- 
tion of,  249 

Brent,  Charles  II.,  463 

Bridges,  Ralph,  219 

Broad  church  party,  174 

Brook,  Stopford,  132 

Brooks,  Rev.   Arthur,  258 

Brooks,  Phillips,  117,  166,  167,  185, 
193,  212,  295,  317,  389 

Browning,   Elizabeth  Barrett,   quoted, 

439,  4SO 
Buffalo  herd,  American,  75,  87 
Bull,  Lanman,  455 
Burbridge,  T.,  quoted,  428 
Burleigh,  Harry,  267 
Burnham,  Mr.,  329 
Burns,  John,  305 

Call  to  St.  George's,  196;  second,  197 
Cambridge  University,  England ;   life 

and  experiences  at,  109,  in,  113 
Canada  in  1869,  73 
Carnegie,  Andrew,  253-5 
Carruth,  Professor,  on  evolution,  210 
Carter,  James,  320 
Castle  Saunderson,  50 
Cathedral,    [P.   E.]    New   York   City, 

248 
Cellini,  Benvenuto,  2 
Century  Club,  316 
Changes,    in    St.    George's,    209;     in 

belief,  370 
Charrington,  F.  N.,  62,  109 
Chester,  William,  266 
Chicago  Fire,  168 
Chicago  World's  Fair,  329-30 
Choate,  Joseph  H.,  320 
Choir,  surpliced,  213 
Christian  endeavour,  225 
Christianity,   Coleridge  on,  7 
Church   at   Dundalk,   17;  institutional, 

219,  230;  free,  259;  man's  need  of 

the,  358 


477 


478 


INDEX 


Church  Congress  at  Boston,  163 
Church   of  England,    Stopford   Brook 

on  the,  132 
Church  of  one  hundred  years  hence, 

350 
Church  policy  lies  with  rector,  267 
Church's  one  duty,  the,  354 
Church's  standards  of  right  and  duty, 

352 
Church  work  in  absence  of  rector,  266 
Class  feeling,  328 
Clergy   forty  years   ago    and   to-day, 

influence  of,   138 
Coat  of  arms,  family,  14 
Coleridge     on     Christianity,     7;     on 

error,  66 
Columbia  River,  206-7 
Colville,  Fort,  104 
Community  houses,  307 
Comstock,  Anthony,  339 
Comte,  August,  22 
Congregational  worship,  216 
Coolock,  suburb  of  Dublin,  12 
Cooperation   in   industrialism,   313 
Crapsey,   Algernon,    373 
Cree  Indians,  89 
Creeds  and  dogmas,  117 
Criticism,  259 
Crocker,  W.  T.,  258,  320 
Croker,  Richard,  210 
Crowds,  American,  330 
Curie,  Madame,  385 

Dale  of  Birmingham,  137 

Dana  of  the  Sun,  306 

Dancing,  value  of,  59;  at  the  Parish 

House,  300 
Darwin,  Charles,  67 
Davidson,  Archbishop  of  Canterbury, 

228 
Daysman,    the    Church    God's,    313; 

quotation  from  Job,  324 
De  Forest,  Lockwood,  319 
Demesne,  the,  38 
Democratic,  aim  to  make  St.  George's, 

279 
Dickson,    Sir  Jeremiah,    15;    Stephen, 

IS 
Dinners,  four  notable,  411 
Disraeli   on  Prohibition,   quoted,    191, 

333 
Dix,  Dr.,  of  Trinity,  313 
Dodge,  Cleveland,  335 
Dodge,  W.  E.,  339,  342,  391 
Dogmatism,   Evangelical,   27 
Dons,   Cambridge,   m 
Dostoievsky  quoted,   379 
Doubts     and     difficulties,     wrestlings 

with,  145 
Dows,    David,    205 


Drummond,  Henry,  "Natural  Law 
and  Spiritual  World,"  336,  339; 
"Greatest  Thing  in  the  World," 
390;  "Ascent  of  Man,"  391 

Dundalk,  old  town  of,  12,  15 ;  mud 
flats  of,  12;  Gaelic  in,  15;  in  history, 
16;  church  at,  17 

Earlham,   127 

Earling,  Albert  J.,  418 

East  End  of  London,  then  and  now, 
no 

Eliot,  Charles  W.,  President  of  Har- 
vard   University,    391 

Elliott,  Daniel  G,  267 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  174;  on  Truth  and 
Repose,  186;  greeting  to  a  friend, 
298;  on  Intellect,  370;  on  Love,  411 

England,  leaving,  140,  146 

Epiphany  House,  old,  247 

Eucharist,  the,  296 

Evangelical  Party  in  England,  64,  199 

Evangelicalism,  Puritan,  its  work,  377 

Evangelicals,  Irish,  22 

Evolution,  in  religion,  176;  sermon 
on,  210 

"Faith,"  paper  on,  385 

Fanning,  Professor,   C.  E.,   a  revival 

preacher,    141 
Farnham,  Lord    (Somerset  Maxwell), 

49 
Faulkner,  Keith,  109 
Fish,   Hamilton,   419 
Fishbourne,  Admiral,   68 
Fiske,  John,   191 
Foch,  Marshal,  quoted,  313 
Foulke,  William,  266 
Fox,  Charles  James,  15,  42 
France,  journey  through,  531 
Frontier  experiences,  74-6 

Game,  correct  method  of  measuring 
length  of,  447 

Garry,   Fort,  77 

Gary,  Judge,  420 

Gaynor,  Judge,  327 

Genoa,  54 

Girls'  Friendly  Society,  294 

Gladstone,  William  Ewart,  66 

God,  concepts  of,  121;  idea  of,  148; 
in  ourselves,  143 ;  sonship  in,  185 ; 
in  us  hard  to  kill,  319;  His  Revela- 
tion,   175 

Godkki,  E.  L.,  316;  Lawrence,  316 

Gospel,  strong,  simple,  148 ;  preach- 
ing the,  164;  of  Jesus,  need  of  to- 
day,  388 

Gould,  Dr.,  136 

Grafton,  Duchess  of,  51 


INDEX 


479 


Grammer,  Dr.,  of  Baltimore,  159 

Grant,  P.  S.,  386 

Grassett,   Dean,   170 

Grassett,    George,    172 

Green,    Emily    Alma      (Mrs.    W.    S. 

Rainsford),  174 
Greer,  Bishop,  461 
Grey,  Judge  John  Clint  n,  413 
Grizzly,  hunting  the,  450 
Grosvenor,  Earl  of,  56,  75 

Habit,  not  memory,  43 

Had  ley,  S.  H.,  240 

Hague,  Dysor,  311 

Hammerschlag,  Arthur,  252 

Hanlon,  Sexton,  300 

Happiness,   lasting,  44 

Haslan,  Mr.,  135 

Hewitt,  Abram,  Mayor  of  New  York, 
315  ;  "first  citizen  in  New  York,"  343 

Hibbert,  Journal,  article  in,  22 

Hitchcock,  Mr.,  316 

Hodges,  Dean  George,  273 

Holiday  and  "Sunlight,"  428 

Holiness,  Conference  on,  145 

Holmes,  Justice,  469 

Holy  Spirit,  35 

Home  life,  28 

Home  and  school  influences,  43 

Hospitality,  London's,  47 ;  on  far 
frontier,    104 

Howland,  Judge,  469 

Hunting  experiences,  438 

Hunting  the  grizzly,  450 

Huntington,  Dr.,  311,  351,  355,  386 

Huxley,  Henry,  67;  on  Extinction,  380 

Hymnology,  in.  Eighteenth  and  Nine- 
teenth centuries,  26 

Ideal,  realization  of  an,  216 

Illness  and  rest,  257 

Immigrant,  treatment  of  the,  273 

Immigrant   spirit   defined   in  Genesis, 

274 
Indians  of  the  Plains,  77,  97 ;  "Stoney," 

singing  of,  100 
Ingram,  Bishop,  227 
Irish    race,    its    power    of    absorbing 

other  peoples,  14 
Itchen  River,  fishing  in,  47;  Viscount 

Grey  on  fly-fishing  in,  47 

Jackson,   Carpenter,  456 

James,  William,   140,  240,   346,   384 

Jameson,  Dr.,  of  "Jameson  Raid,"  319 

Jarvis,  48 

Jesus  Christ,  words  of,  5,  7;  ideal  of, 
374;  the  gospel  of,  356;  religion  of, 
361;  realest  of  the  real,  373 

Jowett,  Dr.,  347 


Kennedy,  David,  434 

Kettle   Falls,   105 

Khayyam,  Omar,  quoted,  277 

King,  Clarence,  316 

King's  messenger,  the,  164 

Kipling,  Rudyard,  73,  318,  328,  416 

Labour  in  England,  the  Church  and, 

64 
Lacombe,  Judge,  419 
Lawrence,  Bishop  William,  391 
Life,  golden  clue  in,   8;   is  good,   10; 

worthwhileness  of,  152;  full  of  God, 

186;  and  its  levels,  472 
Light  out  of  darkness,  182 
Lightfoot,  Professor,  influences  of  his 

teachings,  116 
Lincoln,  Abraham,  346 
Lindley,  Bryant,  235 
Lodge,   Senator,  402 
Logan,  Miss,  68,   149 
London,  removal  to,  21 ;  an  Irish  boy 

in,  44;  East  End  of,  63 
Lone    land,    adventures   in   the   great, 

73,  108,  243 
Loomis,   Dr.  Alfred,  257 
Lough  Sheelan,  49 
Low,    Seth,    and    the    Vestry    of    St. 

George's,  282 
Lowell    quoted,    360 
Luther,   Martin,    178 
Lyte's  "Abide   with   Me,"  216 

Macdonald,  Sir  John,   188-9-90 

Magee,  Dr.,  352 

Mahaffy,    Dr.,   23 

Mahan,  Admiral,   259,   314 

Man's  influence  on  man,  384 

Manchesterism  unchristian,  65 

Manning,   Dr.   William,   314,  356 

Marriage  in  London,   174 

Martineau,  James,  309 

Masefield,  John,  quoted,  460 

Massey,  Gerald,  411,  412 

Maxwell,  Hon.  Somerset,  49 

Mayflower,  the,  279 

Mazzini,  Joseph,    122,   137,   191 

McGee,  Bishop,  352,  429 

McGlynn,  Father,  361 

McKim,    Randolph,    of    Washington, 

170 
McKinley,  President,  412 
Memorial     House     of     St.     George's 

Church,  218 
Memories,   earliest,   9;   and   good-bye, 

460 
Memory,   gift   of,   3 
Men  of  vision,  395 
Mentone,  54 
Meredith,  George,  9 


480 


INDEX 


Metropolitan  Museum  of  Art,  314 

Minutes  of  St.  George's  Vestry,  20a 

Miles,  Dr.,  229,  271 

Miracles,  day  of,  not  over,  263 

Missioner,  an  alien,  151,  173 

Mitchell,  John,   329 

Mitchell,  John  Purroy,  366 

Monod,  Adolphe,  144 

Moody,  Dwight,  144,  336,  389 

Morgan,  J.  P.,  stimulating  influence 
of,  277 ;  traits  of  character,  278 ; 
disagreement  with,  280;  reconcilia- 
tion with,  284;  charm  of,  284; 
faith  of,  284;  characteristics  of,  286, 
292;  emotionalism  of,  287,  289; 
letter  from,  288 ;  builder,  not 
wrecker,  291 ;  tribute  to,  291 ;  New 
Year's  Greetings  from,  292;  mis- 
cellaneous references  to,  197,  201, 
213,  217,  218,  225,  265,  266,  277,  443 

Morgan,  Jr.,  J.  P.,  466 

Morgan,  Junius*,  265 

Morley,  John,  letter  from  Huxley  to, 
380;    dinner   to,    414 

Mother,  15,  28,  39 

Mottet,  Henry,   258 

Mountain  scenery  in  America  and 
Europe,  448 

Munger,   Dr.  T.  T.,  374 

Murphy,  John,  19 

Nash,  J.  W.,  136 

Natural  history,  first  lesson  in,  12 

Nelson,  Rev.  Frank,  396 

New   York,   a   message   to  the   people 

of,  154;  Herald,  209 
Newland,  Miss,  44 
Newton,    Heber,    314;    William    Wil- 

berforce,  letter  from,  169;   Dr.  and 

Mrs.,   163 
Nietzsche,  27 

Norwich,  Eng.,  Ministry  in,  128 
Norwich  Cathedral,  122-3 

Ogle,  William,  teacher  of  the  out-of- 
doors,  430 
Old  creeds  and  doctrines,  34 
Ontario,  Lake,  vacation  on,  158 
Open,  love  of  the,  430 
Osborn,   Fairfield,   Professor,   256 
Osier,  Prof.,  and  euthanasia,  184 
Owen,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Edward,  158 

Parents    and    children,    relations    be- 
tween, 30 
Parish    House,   293,   294,   300,   308 
Parker,  Lindsay,   223,  233,  267 
Parkhurst,  Dr.  Charles  H.,  322 
Parks,  Dr.  Leighton,  368 
Parnell,  Charles  Stewart,  368 


Paul,  St.,  184,  378 

Pelham,  Rt.  Rev.,  the  Hon.  John 
Thomas,  Bishop  of  Norwich,  122-3 

People,  the  spirit  of  the,  352 

Perkins,  George,  335 

Pike,  H.  H.,  303 

Pitt,  Fort,  on  the  Saskatchewan,  85 

Piatt,  Senator,  320 

Players'  Club,  316 

Plutarch's  Lives,  2 

Poor,  63,  65,  298 

Porter,  Henry  Kirk,  324 

Potter,  Bishop,  157,  231,  245,  246,  247, 
248,   254,   255,   345,   391 

Poverty  in  New  York,  312 

Prairie,   the   Western,   78 

Preacher,  the,  must  be  ahead  of  his 
flock,  264 

Preaching,    128,    154,    180,   384 

Price,  Theodor  H.,  251 

Prohibition,   333 

Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  346; 
Bishop  Brooks  on,  359;  not  in- 
tended to  be  a  class  church,  395 

Purity,  119 

Quain,  Dr.,  52 
Quebec,  73 

Race,  a  vanishing,  92 

Radium,   discovery  of,  in  1898,  385 

Rainsford,  ancestry,  13 ;  Archbishop  of 
Rouen,  13;  family  motto,  14;  Guy, 
13;  Robert,  14;  Marcus,  32,  227; 
Kerr,  392 

Rainsford,  Rev.  W.  S.,  ancestry,  13 ; 
birth,  12;  early  life,  9,  36;  early 
education,  36-44;  life  in  London,  44- 
52 ;  youthful  illness,  52-63  ;  preach- 
ing in  London  slums,  63-73  >  trip 
to  Canada,  73-110;  college  days  at 
Cambridge,  110-22;  ministry  at 
Norwich,  Eng.,  122-51 ;  missionary 
work  in  U.  S.,  151-74;  marriage, 
174;  success  and  failure  in  To- 
ronto, 174-203 ;  rector  of  St. 
George's,  203 ;  resignation  in  1906, 
461 

Reading,  leisure  for,  175 

Red  man,  a  decent  fellow,  96;  in 
his  home,  98 

Reichert,  John,  268,  269,  461 

Reiland,  Rev.  Karl,   355 

Reinhardt,  Ernest,  308 

Religion,  definition  of,  381;  evolu- 
tionary, 138;  cause  of  real,  in  Eng- 
land, saved  by  Evangelicals  in 
Eighteenth  Century,  24;  Stevenson 
on,  34;  thoughts  on,  179 


INDEX 


481 


Religious  doubts  and  difficulties,  137; 

experiences,  6,  273 ;  life  in  England, 

decay  of,   134 
Renaissance,  2 
Resilience,   spiritual,   184 
Riviera,  stay  at,  55 
Revivals,  religious,  141 
Rhodes,  Cecil,  319 
Riis,  Jacob,  236,  255,  369 
Ripley,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  William  N.,  126 
Robertson,  of  Brighton,   137 
Robinson  Crusoe,  a  boy  on,  305 
Rockaway  Beach,  229,  271 
Roman  Catholic  Church  in  New  York, 

360 
Roosevelt,    Theodore,    189,    290,    315, 

322,  395,  400,  409,  415 
Root,  Elihu,  322,  413 
Rowing  at  Cambridge,  114 
Royce,  quotation  from,  117,  370 
Russell,  Bobby,  318 

St.  Gauden's,  Augustus,  317 

St.  George's,  5,   196,  197,  203,  208 

St.  Giles's,  Norwich,  132 

St.  James  (Toronto),  the  Cathedral 
of,  170 

St.  John's  Church,  Halkin  Street,  Bel- 
grave  Square,  45 

St.    Paul,    quoted,    184,    378 

St.  Paul,  Minn.,  76-7 

Salisbury,  Lord,  191 

Saloons,  337-8 

Satterlee,  Bishop,  209,  397 

Sauk  Centre,  77 

Sanderson,  Edward,  50 

Saunderson,  Hon.  Helena,  50 

Scadding,  Bishop,  272 

Schieffelin,  W.  H.,  209,  211-12,  266, 
298 

Schiller  quoted,  428 

School,   industrial,  251 

Schooldays,  36 

Sedgwick,  Rev.  Theodore,  251 

Sermons,  first  efforts  at,  failures,  127; 
extempore,  127 

"Service,"  awakening  desire  of,  107 

Sheckelton,  Miss,  20 

Simpson,  Dr.  A.  B.,  245 

Smith,  Goldwin,   187,   188 

Smith,  Hopkinson,   318 

Somerset  Club,   169 

Spring,  Richard  Hovey's  lines  on,  54 

Spurgeon,  Charles  Haddon,  139 

Starr,   Dr.  Allen,  468 

Stearns,  J.  Noble,  197,  207,  266 

Stein,  Alexis,   55,   396 

Stoney  Indians,   100,   102 

Story,  Richard,   quoted,   54 


Strong,  William  L.,  320,  360 

Sturgis,  Russell,   169 

Sun    (N.  Y.),  306 

Sunday,  Rev.  William   ("Billy"),  389 

Taft,  President,  322 
Talmud,  the,  232 
Tammany  Hall,  320 
Taylor,  Bishop   Jeremy,   361 
Taylor,  Herbert,  419 
Taylor,    Sedley,   313 
Tennyson's      "In      Memoriam,"      61; 
"Wages,"     381;     other     quotations, 

135,   174 
Test  of  men  and  measures,  256 
Thackeray  on  Friendships  of  Youth, 

146 
"Theologs,"  125 
Theology,  changing,  261 
Thompson's,     Francis,     "Anthem     of 

Earth,"   78 
Todhunter,  Professor,  111 
Tomkins,  Floyd,  117 
Tony,  236 

Toronto,  call  to,  179;  failure  in,  181 
Tracy,  Charles,  200,  204,  316 
"Trust  your  fellow  men,"  471 
Tyng,  Dr.,  190-1 

United    States,    author's    first   mission 

in,  162 
Upton,  48 
Ute  war,  incident  of  the,  453 

Varley,  Henry,  135-6,  149 
Visit  from  father,  464 

Waterhouse,  Theodore,  59,   115 
Watney,   Herbert,   70;   Mrs.,  31 
Watts,   Isaac,  216 
Wesley,  John,  24 
Westcott,  Professor,  84 
Whiskey  trading,  84 
Whitney,  William  C,  315 
Whitridge,  F.  W.,  419 
Whittaker's   shop,    155 
Wickersham,  G.  W.,  419 
Williams,  Doctor,  198 
Williams,  J.  E.,  418 
Wilson,  Henry,  221,  245,  246,  258 
Winthrop,  Robert  C.,  on  slavery,   168 
Wolff,  Colonel,  425 
Worcester,  Rev.  Ellwood,   117 
Wordsworth  on  Nature,  120 
Working  class,   the   Church   and   the, 

66 
Worship,  216;  among  the  young,  23a 
Wortley,    Stewart,   251 

Young,  work  among,  232 


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